Title: Shylock
Is My Name
Author: Howard
Jacobsen
Publisher:
Hogarth Shakespeare
Publish
date: 2016
ISBN: 978-2-701-18899-3
‘He had a
madness, a frenzy. Had she been forced to teach what he had she’d have called
it Judeolunacy.’
This piece
by Booker-prize winning Jacobsen is termed a ‘re-telling’ of The Merchant of Venice, but it really
isn’t. It’s a variation on a theme of. Its main thrust is the use of the
question of why Antonio is ‘sad’ as a peg to hang the question of Jewish identity
and self-perception on. But the book does not limit itself to simply the one
play: throughout, there are constant Shakespearean references and allusions,
all extremely cleverly woven in and dropped at artistic angles into the prose.
Characters from the original play(s) are split, mirrored, doubled, melded and
generally played with until they form entirely separate entities. I love
Shakespeare. I love clever writing. Yet this book put me to sleep and was a
chore to get through.
On the
surface, the first explanation one seizes on is that, as a secularist, I really
have no personal or vested interest in any way as to what Jewish identity is,
where it is going, or how it affects Jews. But that’s not true. Firstly because
I would be interested anyway, and secondly because I’d be perfectly happy to
read about identity crisis in a fictional tribe of Martians, as long as it was engaging. The real
reason is that there are NO likable characters. You simply cannot run a story
where every single character could happily perish and the fictional world be
none the poorer. None have mitigating factors, either. There are personal
struggles, and more than enough soul-searching, but no indication at any point
that any single character might become an even moderately approachable human
being, no matter what moral conclusion they came to. So what’s the point?
Alas, not
much. It feels as if it’s been written to order by a fantastic brain and a
great linguist, without any real emotional grounding. The plot is ornate and careful.
It’s not gripping.
The book
did however afford me two separate pleasures. One was that as I was reading,
the style struck me as extremely similar to The
Finkler Question which I’d read a while back. I didn’t remember who’d
written it. When I found out it was the same author I had a small thrill of
critical vindication. The second pleasure was that when my 12-year-old son
asked me how the book was going, and I explained the pleasure of finding this
out, he nodded sagely and said: ‘Ah, that’s like when I’m watching a basketball
game, and I can tell who the coach is from the moves they’re making.’ So there
you go. Literary criticism = basketball coaching.
