Within the first few pages of Zoo Time Guy Ableman, Howard Jacobson’s unlikely hero, is abused by an unruly reading group for hating all women and children, reprimanded for stuffing his face with a sausage roll in an Oxfam bookshop (‘a tact-thing presumably’), and then arrested by the police for stealing his own book from the same charitable shop. He doesn’t believe stealing is the right term though; he has merely ‘released’ it.

It is unsurprising therefore, that Howard Jacobson believes novels should offend. Through the disconsolate eyes of Guy Ableman, a failed novelist who believes Milton was describing Chipping Norton when he coined the expression ‘darkness visible’, Jacobson writes a gloomy and sarcastic view of the world. But it is not a dreary book – it is jagged, rude and very, very funny. It bathes in its offensiveness.

Guy Ableman is in thrall to his beautiful and ferocious red-headed wife, but he is no less in thrall to her mother, Poppy. Their ‘blistering presence’ destroys Guy’s peace of mind and his work, what there is of it, suffers. But Guy wonders whose work isn’t suffering at a time when publishers are committing suicide and agents act like fugitives. Guy fears that reading is ‘finished’, the industry is in crisis, and literature is dead, his desperate avoidance of personal disappointment and universal despair fixate him on his desire for his mother in law, as he reasons that fiction might be dead but desire isn’t. It is all he has left.

Luckily for Jacobson it definitely isn’t all he has left. Two years on from winning the Man Booker Prize, Jacobson has created another hilarious and compelling work of art. Jacobsob himself believes novels should rouse, shock and upset. Zoo Time definitely keeps you on your toes.

 

Zoo Time is available now from Bloomsbury
Words: Lottie Brown