Howling in protest
Book Review by Dr Anne Sarzin
The wailing and complaining that reverberate throughout Howard Jacobson’s latest novel, hOWL, will resonate with readers traumatised by global manifestations of Jew-hatred at home in Australia and abroad. Undoubtedly, they will understand the consequences of the threatening marches, terrorist banners and hate-filled protest placards that have exploded in public places, disrupting peaceful precincts and corroding accepted norms of Western society. But Jacobson has not given us a linear or straightforward exposition of contemporary antisemitism and anti-Zionism. Instead, we are catapulted into the heart of an extremely dark, irresistibly funny and superbly witty novel that explores from multiple perspectives the nature of evil and its pernicious and destabilising effects on society, family and especially the individual.
In this case, the individual who dominates the novel and narrates events in the first person is the central character and antihero, Dr Ferdinand Draxler, the Jewish principal of a primary school in South London. Ferdinand, the son of a Holocaust survivor, is married to an Anglican actress, Charmian. They have a daughter, Zoe, a zealous participant in pro-Palestine marches through the city. She voices their vicious antisemitic slogans and parrots Islamist ideology. Ferdinand’s brother Isak, a failed Jerusalem seminarian, liberates himself from his perceived religious constraints and, transformed, returns to the family fold, exacerbating the tensions. There is a fascinating cast of ancillary personalities that adds to the highly volatile and combustible nature of events. In the beginning, Jacobson quotes Allen Ginsberg’s epigram from his poem Howl, ‘I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by madness’, a pertinent starting point that presages the disastrous developments that challenge and call into question everything that Dr Draxler formerly stood for in his world now under unremitting siege by political ideologues, including his deputy headmaster, the convert to Judaism Max Axelberg.
There is a lot of shock and horror in this novel, and much wit and wisdom. One can never forget that Ferdinand is a second-generation survivor, immensely conscious of his mother’s suffering as a young girl in Belsen. She tells him, ‘to escape is not the same as to be healed’. So healing in this dystopian novel of disintegration is a very remote prospect that lures Ferdinand forward in a quest to secure for Mutti and for himself a measure of serenity, tranquillity of heart and mind, illusory states in his world fractured by the unimaginable evil of the Hamas massacre and the subsequent unravelling of peaceful co-existence and respectful dialogue in Western democracies. While Ferdinand’s world is falling apart, as reason is drowned out by the cacophony of megaphones and marches, he attempts to lighten his mother’s burdens, if at all possible, and interrogates at the same time a host of issues that crowd in on his consciousness and bedevil his thinking, including the euphemisms broadcast by television presenters, who fail to call a massacre a massacre or cannot say the word terrorist. ‘How long before we’d be referring to that sunny day when some nice Arabs crossed over from Gaza for a tea party?’ Ferdinand asks. He also tackles head-on the vexed question of Jews who march with people openly seeking their extermination. When his brother disparages the Jews of Israel, Ferdinand upbraids him in language that ripens by the syllable, ‘The opposite to fanatic fucking Jew doesn’t have to be fanatic fucking Jew-hater. There’s going quiet. There’s indifference. There’s staying shtum.’ The personal dissolution and defection of those around him, exemplified in different ways by his daughter and his brother, was intensified by the climate of political warmongering, ‘I sensed a greater virulence in the invocations of the Nazis, whether as heroes who should have gone on killing those they’d been killing, or as monsters with whom it was reasonable to compare those they hadn’t killed enough of. This greater virulence, I surmised, was a direct consequence of the massacre. Permission to slaughter had been given, which fed the appetite to slaughter more.’
Importantly, Jacobson evaluates the ancient blood libels that have been revived, as well as the well-trodden pathways of antisemitic idiomatic usage that has migrated from the linguistic margins of Jew-hatred to the mainstream. ‘The stuff that kids are now hearing in the playground,’ Ferdinand tells his wife, ‘is a linguistic infection for which there might be no cure. When did you last hear the State of Israel not called genocidal? How long before the Nazi Jew passes into everyday speech? NaziJew—one word.’ The pressure mounts, there are few safety valves and his state of mind deteriorates markedly.
But Jacobson has refuge and redemption hidden up his literary sleeve, a credible magical apotheosis that depends for its efficacy on a tree called the gharqad, rooted in the Israeli landscape and flourishing in an Islamic hadith. Who would have known? But nothing surprises one when Jacobson is at the literary helm. He’s inventive and imaginative, capable of penning Shakespearean sentences, as well as foul-mouthed expletives. He depicts life with all its faults and fables, a panoply of ideas that challenge, distract and discomfit. The ground shifts beneath the reader’s feet, as it does in life with the current inversion of values effected by shape-shifting forces. This is a compelling novel reflecting our turbulent and apocalyptic times. One is left marvelling at the prodigious imagination and powers of observation of an accomplished storyteller. There’s accuracy and authenticity, pity and poignancy in Jacobson’s depictions of the home and family, the street and its people, and all their interactions in competing worlds that he observes and processes with inordinate skill and empathy.
Howl
By Howard Jacobson
Jonathan Cape, London,
Penguin Random House UK 2026
