hOWL - Review

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Written by Howard Jacobson

In perhaps one of the most shamelessly exploitative works of fiction, and arguably an extremely unfunny comedy, Howard Jacobson’s hOWL charts the journey of Ferdinand Draxler MBE, a Jewish headteacher from south London as he navigates his world following the massacres of October 7th 2023.

Draxler is a character whose credibility quite simply defies belief. Married to a non-Jew, their daughter Zoe is a staunch antizionist, his brother Isak who had emigrated to Israel also harbors a skeptical view of the Jewish state. Draxler’s Deputy Head, Axelberg, is a Christian man who converts to Judaism so that he too can assume an Israel-critical stance. Draxler’s mother is a survivor of Bergen-Belsen concentration camp where she may, or may not, have had a sexual relationship with the camp’s Nazi commandant.

Notwithstanding this eclectic array of characters, Jacobson subjects his protagonist to the raft of de-humanizing experiences that have befallen the diaspora since October 7th. Many readers will have found themselves facing ghastly antisemitic challenges in recent times. Draxler experiences almost all of them. De-platforming, raw hatred, Banksy’s murals, heck, even Glastonbury gets a mention. It is as though Jacobson has worked his way through a checklist of antisemitic/antizionist tropes and abuses, ensuring that as many as possible can be woven into the threadbare tapestry of his prose.

The book drifts in and out of reality, Jacobson perhaps having intended his blurred use of timelines to reflect Draxler’s loss of reason as the narrative unfolds. In reality, this blurring by the writer masks an overall incoherence that is found to be liberally sprinkled with gratuitous sexual references. Other than for prurient sensationalism, or a (very) cheap laugh, why else does Jacobson feel the need to let us know that as a teenager, Isak masturbated into his shirt drawer?

Almost halfway through the novel, Jacobson reveals a worrying (possibly autobiographical?) sentiment. In a letter that Draxler is penning to his daughter in an attempt towards an ideological reconciliation, he writes: “I won’t say the baby-murdering, land-grabbing Jew you march against does not somewhere exist, but he is not me.” In that one sentence Jacobson single-handedly pours petrol onto the fires of one of the oldest antisemitic tropes, the Blood Libel, and for that, Howard Jacobson, one of the most celebrated Jewish writers of our time, is to be condemned.

The book’s jacket bears a quote from Patrick Marber, lauding hOWL that reads: “A howling comic masterpiece”. In those four words Marber brings the classic children’s fable of The Emperor’s New Clothes, bang up to date. To be clear, Jacobson has not written a comic masterpiece.

To have released – what the book’s publishers Jonathan Cape describe as – a ‘tragicomedy’, in the wake of October 7th, a day so horrific that many of its survivors have yet to fully address the impact of its trauma and more than 1,200 families mourn their murdered relatives, and as world Jewry faces murderous antisemitism on a scale not seen since the Holocaust, stands as possibly the most crass, insensitive and shamefully opportunistic decision in the hitherto noble history of Anglo-Jewish literature.

The writers Eli Wiesel and Eli Sharabi, who both survived the horrors of the infernal depths of antisemitic Jew-hatred, are amongst the most qualified to write of those desperate times. In their shadow, Jacobson is but a literary pygmy. He should donate any income earned from this execrable work to a charity that supports the rebuilding of those devastated Israeli communities within the Gaza Envelope.

hOWL is available from all the usual bookselling outlets.