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Howard Jacobson

J

About the Book

Set in the future — a world where the past is a dangerous country, not to be talked about or visited — J is a love story of incomparable strangeness, both tender and terrifying.

Two people fall in love, not yet knowing where they have come from or where they are going. Kevern doesn’t know why his father always drew two fingers across his lips when he said a word starting with a J. It wasn’t then, and isn’t now, the time or place to be asking questions. Ailinn too has grown up in the dark about who she was or where she came from. On their first date Kevern kisses the bruises under her eyes. He doesn’t ask who hurt her. Brutality has grown commonplace. They aren’t sure if they have fallen in love of their own accord, or whether they’ve been pushed into each other’s arms. But who would have pushed them, and why?

Hanging over the lives of all the characters in this novel is a momentous catastrophe — a past event shrouded in suspicion, denial and apology, now referred to as WHAT HAPPENED, IF IT HAPPENED.

J is a novel to be talked about in the same breath as Nineteen Eighty-Four and Brave New World, thought-provoking and life-changing. It is like no other novel that Howard Jacobson has written.

About the Author

HOWARD JACOBSON won the Bollinger Everyman Wodehouse award in 2000 for The Mighty Walzer and then again in 2013 for Zoo Time. In 2010 he won the Man Booker Prize for The Finkler Question. He has written thirteen novels and five works of non-fiction.

J

To Jenny — here, now, always

ARGUMENT

The Wolf and the Tarantula

A GREY WOLF fell into conversation with a tarantula. ‘I love the chase,’ the grey wolf said.

‘Myself,’ said the tarantula, ‘I like to sit here and wait for my prey to come to me. ’ ‘Don’t you find that lonely?’ the wolf asked. ‘I could as soon ask you,’ the tarantula replied, ‘how it is that you don’t get sick of taking your wife and kids along on every hunt. ’ ‘I am by temperament a family man,’ the wolf answered. ‘And what is more there is power in numbers. ’

The tarantula paused to crush a passing marmoset then said he doubted the wolf, for all the help he received, would ever be as successful a huntsman as he was. The wolf wagered a week’s catch on his ability to outhunt the tarantula and, returning to his lair, told his wife and children of the bet.

‘You owe me,’ he told the tarantula when they next met.

‘And your proof?’

‘Well I expect you to trust my word, but if you don’t, then go ahead and search the wilderness with your own eyes. ’

This the tarantula did, and sure enough discovered that of all the wolf’s natural prey not a single creature remained.

‘I salute your efficiency,’ the tarantula said, ‘but it does occur to me to wonder what you are going to do for sustenance now. ’

At this the grey wolf burst into tears. ‘I have had to eat my wife,’ he admitted. ‘And next week I will start on my children. ’

‘And after that?’

‘After that? After that I will have no option but to eat myself. ’