Sunday 12 August 2012

The Finkler Question

by Howard Jacobson


I've always been suspicious of the Booker Prize: a solid, stick-in-the-mud reward to literary doggedness and middlebrow worthiness that guarantees reading matter for the leafy home counties if nothing else. As a Nobel Prize lite it tends to award writers for what they mean rather than what they write. 

Howard Jacobson's The Finkler Question has a central question that falls perfectly in the Booker court: what is Jewishness? And what does it mean to be Jewish in England today? It's a question that it signally fails to answer.

Jacobson's method in posing this question is to tell the story of three men and the women who orbit them (my language here merely reflects the novel's sexism rather than my own - I'm a new man , to quote Roots Manuva). 
The men in question are: Julian Treslove, professional double; Sam Finkler, media philosopher; and Libor Sevcik, a Czech emigre and schoolteacher turned gossip columnist. 

And that's where the problems start. These people are completely implausible, and live in a world that seems to exist at best in parallel to the real one, at worst not at all. Libor lives in a grand "apartment" looking out over Regent's Park (but who in England says apartment when "flat" will do?). Likewise Julian Treslove's "apartment" is not in Hampstead, but rather in a place that people merely claim to be Hampstead. Very funny to people who live in Hampstead maybe, but for people who couldn't even afford a terraced house in any of London's grottiest boroughs (i.e. most of us) the humour is pretty much academic. 
Yes, in this book we are in the charmed circle of the do-nothing, loll-about arty-farty rich - people who for no good reason have large "apartments" in St. John's Wood, take on and drop BBC jobs at a whim and for whom money is no object and no concern. 

Added to that, Howard Jacobson's powers of description at no point ruffle the slick surface of the verbiage. It's all talk. I longed for a brief passage of description, and curt, indicative sentence that telegraphically summarized a feeling, a state of mind, the overall tilt of the narrative. But there's nothing of the sort. It's all anecdote after anecdote. In fact I have to wonder whether it's a novel at all. 

The result is a storyline that meanders like a slow-moving river without the slightest danger of penury, dearth or excitement. We are in a world of talkers, or tale tellers, of babblers, whose telltale babbleologies are meant to make us laugh, make us cry, but leave us feeling rather…bored. Yes, Howard Jacobson has managed to take one of the most interesting and controversial questions of our time (the Jewish one that is) and make it dull. I suppose that that is also an achievement of sorts.