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Howard Jacobson writes characters at their wits’ end; those characters are usually men, and those men are usually Jewish. Additionally, and problematically for both them and everyone around them, their collective wits are capacious: easily enlarged to allow idiosyncrasy to bloom into neurosis, preoccupation into obsession. And Jacobson’s men do the opposite of suffering in silence (although they do that too); they are much given to exhaustive and exhausting disputation, to arguing their point long after their interlocutors are longing for bed, and not in the fun way all parties might hope.
With its straightforward allusion to another Jewish writer’s witness to anguish, Howl appears to make its intentions apparent from the outset: we are located in the world of mental dissolution, of consciousness strained and subsequently fractured. But rather than Allen Ginsberg’s would-be seekers of enlightenment, disappearing into the volcanoes of Mexico and “scattering their semen freely” through rose gardens and cemeteries,Jacobson’s avatar is a somewhat prim, suburban primary school headteacher, driven to distraction not by free love and copious hallucinogens, but by fizzing anger and agonising guilt.
The extent to which both emotions – and their countless related variations and subsets – have been dormant within him is one of the novel’s puzzles, but the catalyst for their current manifestation is abundantly clear: the events and aftermath of the Hamas attacks on Israel on 7 October 2023, as experienced by a British Jew living and working in London. Ferdinand Draxler, whose immoderate loves include his actor wife, Charmian, their academically minded daughter Zoe and the correct deployment of grammar, is at once adrift: his staff room, his family and his city divided. On the one hand, Ferdinand’s travails are bathetic and Prufrockian – his pleasurable Saturday afternoons buying chocolate in Fortnum & Mason and tripping round the Royal Academy are now subject to disruption by pro-Palestinian marches. But it’s not long before he is confronted by the image of his daughter chanting vociferously in the midst of the protests and ripping down pictures of hostages.
Jacobson has written and spoken about how unmoored he has felt from his country, society and fellow citizens during the brutal conflict in Israel and Gaza, and has attracted opprobrium for doing so; in Howl, he explores not simply a feeling of being out of joint with the times, but of experiencing the reawakened fear of displacement and violence that antisemitism provokes. He knows, one suspects, that some readers will find this utterly enraging, not to say morally repulsive, and he confronts them head on; in Ferdinand Draxler, he creates a man who wholeheartedly believes that 7 October has allowed Jew-hatred to flourish untrammelled, who argues – to anyone who will listen, and even more to those who will not – that it has provided the alibi for antisemites to do what they wanted to do all along.
Unsurprisingly, Howl is an immensely uncomfortable novel; it is also, like most of Jacobson’s work, a comic one. So of course Ferdinand’s deputy headmaster is a convert to Judaism who now repudiates Israel, not to mention his boss; of course his wife is a Gentile who treats her husband with an exceptional degree of forbearance and tenderness as he sits “stimming”, externalising his pain by feverishly twitching and jiggling and knotting his napkin; of course he rewards her by committing infidelity – in the mind and heart only, but still – with an ethereal Jewish woman he happens upon in a park, who turns out to be the love object of his brother, the formerly devout and now infuriatingly laid-back Isak. And of course, behind them all stands Mutti, a survivor of Belsen whom Ferdinand feels duty-bound to protect from the swastikas and sub-Banksy murals that appear on her garden gate.
How are we to balance our sympathy for Ferdinand’s pain and torment with our alienation from his increasingly driven and risky behaviour, as he stalks the streets of London seeking out instances of antisemitism, or takes his young Jewish pupils on expeditions to paint over graffiti? He is, evidently, going mad. And yet his frequent rejoinder that he is living through a time of madness is hard to deny.
It is his deep affinity with grammar – and particularly a bucolic sentence concerning a honeysuckle hedge and a pair of nesting linnets that he is fond of parsing – that gives us a clue. He is a man who believes that everything – a subject, a verb, an object – has its proper place, its correct relation to the elements alongside it, a logic that doesn’t simply ensure its own functionality but which creates the conditions for thinking. Get the grammar right, and the thoughts will follow; get it wrong, and the muddle becomes unnavigable, anarchic. Draxler finds himself in ungrammatical times, with no primer to help him escape them. He is not alone there, no matter how much he feels himself to be so.
Howl by Howard Jacobson is published by Jonathan Cape (£20). To support the Guardian, order your copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply.
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