Howl by Howard Jacobson

Howard Jacobson is perhaps Britain’s most prominent Jewish novelist, and certainly Britain’s most prominent Jewish novelist who deals consistently with Jewish themes. He’s singularly adept at extracting laughter from unpromising subjects – as he demonstrated in particular in Kalooki Nights (2006), a sort of Bumper Book of Holocaust Gags. ‘Adorno famously said that, after the Holocaust, poetry wasn’t a good idea,’ observes its narrator, a creator of satirical comic strips. ‘He never thought there was need to include cartoons in that proscription.’

Howl, his eighteenth novel, opens on the day before the 7 October attacks and unfolds over the following year or so. Ferdinand is the headteacher of a primary school in Streatham, south London. Soon after the atrocities in the Negev desert, his local area’s ‘vaunted multicultural liberality’ takes on a different complexion. There’s dancing in the streets and, from previously right--thinking colleagues, declarations of ‘solidarity’ with those who did the killing. ‘Who knew, before 7 October,’ he asks, ‘what would make so many people happy!’ ‘Good morning, freedom,’ his daughter Zoe, a student at Oxford, texts her non-Jewish mother, Charmian, the day after the slaughter. Even Ferdinand’s brother, Isak, recently returned from Israel, isn’t all that sympathetic. Asked why he fled the Jewish homeland, he replies, ‘too much of the chosen-people shit’.

As horrifying as Ferdinand finds the deeds of Hamas, it’s the fallout in his own country that really unsettles him. ‘Sir,’ enquires one of his pupils, ‘are you complicit in the genocide?’ This is an allusion to the case brought before the International Court of Justice against Israel in late