Like every non-World War II new release, this novel is set in a futuristic dystopia. An unnamed nation (presumably Britain; there are a lot of unnamed things in this book) has become a repressive totalitarian regime following events known only as “What happened, if it happened”. Obviously these events are not openly discussed, but the chronology gradually emerges: unrest in the Middle East as catalyst, escalated by social media, and culminating in the large-scale massacre of an unnamed race of people (apparently Jewish, but we don’t really know for sure until very late in the book).
In response to What Happened, the entire population has been given new (very Jewish-sounding) names, and social media (indeed, apparently all internet access) banned. Also unlawful (well, there’s no “law” against it, but everyone knows better than to do it) is jazz, degenerate art, and hoarding more than a couple of family heirlooms or antiques. The government demands an attitude of pious regret and apology from its citizens. The result of all this is a barely contained systemic rage, which manifests itself in petty (and not so petty) violence and discord. Our Winston Smith character is under some kind of surveillance, whether for good or evil we’re not sure. He’s such a non-personality I can’t summon too much energy to feel sorry for him if it’s a malevolent force watching him.
Here’s the thing. The great 20th century dystopias – 1984, Brave New World – were great because they extrapolated from contemporary politics ad absurdum, and presented a version of the future that may have been exaggerated, but was an exaggerated version of the possible, or even the likely. I’m not sure that J works as anything other than a thought experiment, and not an entirely convincing one at that. Some of the ideas – such as the undercurrent of social violence resulting from the lack of a common “enemy” (which is evidently the position that Jacobson, a Jewish writer, considers his people occupy) – are interesting, if not exactly original. I’m pretty sure, though, that the trajectory of recent history is not toward a British holocaust, especially not one carried out by the apparently spontaneous actions of an entire nation of angry mobs.
I’m not Jewish, and I certainly don’t want to speak to the experiences of Jewish Brits (or British Jews?). It may be that, as the Handmaid’s Tale resonated with me as (at least in part) a parable about the denial of women’s rights, J will resonate with Jewish readers who will find in it a reflection of some part of their experiences. If that’s the case, the novel did a bad job of conveying to a gentile exactly how it functions in that sense. Maybe I’m not the intended audience, I don’t know. Either way, it presented some useful ideas but was not otherwise particularly memorable for me.