If it had been possible to listen to Howard Jacobson’s brilliant Booker Prize-short- listed novel in one sitting I would happily have done so; but even on motorways congested to the point of strangulation, a return journey from Chipping Norton to Brighton has yet to take 13 hours.
If it had been possible to listen to Howard Jacobson’s brilliant Booker Prize-short- listed novel in one sitting I would happily have done so; but even on motorways congested to the point of strangulation, a return journey from Chipping Norton to Brighton has yet to take 13 hours.
I have emerged from a state of tunnel-vision absorption; rarely have I come across a novel with such a range of themes and emotions to digest: anguish, infidelity, loyalty, circumcision, Zionism, Judaism, mugging, the BBC, even online poker — and one would have to listen all over again to absorb fully the stinging humour and myriad jokes.
This richness is simplified by the dazzling performance of the narrator, Steven Crossley. I have little desire to meet any of the characters, but thanks to Crossley’s skill, they appear to be lurking lifelike somewhere, and often not far enough away.
Julian Treslove, the central character, is a perpetually anxious 49-year-old Gentile: ‘He bored women into hating him — a stifler of their dreams.’ Not physically unattractive, Treslove makes his living as a celebrity lookalike (‘he looked like everyone and everybody, but in fact was a no-one and a nobody’). He has two odious sons, Alfredo and Rodolfo (Alf and Ralph), the results of hasty encounters with different women (the four meet in a cheerless restaurant to vilify the doleful Treslove). Alf plays the piano in sleazy seaside hotels where, more than once, he bumps into his father’s best friend (and occasional enemy), Samuel Finkler.
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