In the original dustsheet. Navy binding with gilt title on the spine.

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• ‘Full of wit, warmth, intelligence, human feeling and understanding. It is also beautifully written with that sophisticated and near invisible skill of the authentic writer’ – Observer

• ‘Wonderful … Jacobson is seriously on form’ – Evening Standard

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Julian Treslove, a professionally unspectacular former BBC radio producer, and Sam Finkler, a popular Jewish philosopher, writer and television personality, are old school friends. Despite very different lives, they’ve never quite lost touch with each other – or with their former teacher, Libor Sevcik. Both Libor and Finkler are recently widowed, and together with Treslove they share a sweetly painful evening revisiting a time before they had loved and lost. It is that very evening, when Treslove hesitates a moment as he walks home, that he is attacked – and his whole sense of who and what he is slowly and ineluctably changes.

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‘How is it possible to read Howard Jacobson and not lose oneself in admiration for the music of his language, the power of his characterisation and the penetration of his insight? … The Finkler Question is further proof, if any was needed, of Jacobson’s mastery of humour’ – The Times

‘There are few writers who exhibit the same unawed respect for language or such a relentless commitment to re-examining even the most seemingly unobjectionable of received wisdoms’ – Daily Telegraph

Review: Yes, there are witticisms on almost every page. Jacobson is an observer who makes such persistent fun of Jewish navel-gazing that one feels he is actually a navel-gazer himself. Every Jewish attitude, every Jewish argument, is put through the hoops: Zionism and anti-Zionism; what Jews think non-Jews think and what non-Jews think Jews think; Jews who are ashamed of what fellow-Jews are doing and Jews who defend what fellow-Jews are doing; Jews who are sick of Holocaust talk and Jews who can’t stop talking about the Holocaust; Jews who make jokes about Jews and Jews who resent non-Jews making jokes about Jews (often the same Jews); Jews who don’t like hearing non-Jews saying that Jews run everything, and Jews who are delighted to notice that Jews run so many things (again often the same Jews); German Jews who look down on Czech Jews; Jews who love music and Jews who are fabulous cooks; self-hating Jews, Jews who hate most other Jews, and wannabe Jews; Jews who want to assimilate and Jews who think they never can; Jews who see in every antisemitic incident a danger to their existence in Britain and Jews who play down the significance of such incidents; Jews who are “Jew-ish” (in Jonathan Miller’s words) and Jews who are Jewish; – enough already, I often thought. Only once, towards the end, did I come across a testamentary passage which, behind all the mockery, I take to be Jacobson’s own stance. And on some other levels, too, I thought that the ending of the book – and then only sporadically – engages with more real emotion than is conveyed by his stream of ironic observations.

The central character, Julian Treslove, is not Jewish, but he is close to two Jews: his school contemporary Sam Finkler and their former teacher Libor Sevcik. Yet he feels an outsider in their company. Though he sees a lot of Sam, he doesn’t like him, and singles him out for what is typically enviable and also typically dislikeable about Jews – so much so that mentally he uses the word Finkler to mean Jewish. The Finkler Question is therefore the Jewish Question. As an outsider he desperately tries to become an insider, especially after, early in the book, he is mugged by a woman who hissed something at him in the act of mugging which he hears as “You Jew!” He begins to wonder whether he is not actually a natural Jew, then tries hard to be a Jew, but constantly feels that he fails the test: there is some mysterious element about being Jewish that escapes him, and its absence never escapes real Jews. That’s not just the question of circumcision with which – in a book in which sex plays a big part – he is extensively preoccupied. But IF paranoia and guilt feelings are characteristics specifically associated with Jews, he has those in spades.

I find Jules the least credible character in the book. He is an inadequate man, prepared for bad things to happen to him (and they often do); and yet he is apparently so seductive that he can sleep with any of many women he takes a fancy to. He falls in love with them all; but they all leave him – at least all the non-Jewish ones do: only with a vast motherly Jewess does he find happiness for a time, until his insecurity about his identity contributes to make that relationship problematic, too. I don’t find the book well constructed, and felt that the very last few pages were unsatisfactory. The panel that awarded it the Man-Booker Prize in 2010 clearly thought otherwise.

Howard Eric Jacobson (born 25 August 1942) is a British novelist and journalist. He is known for writing comic novels that often revolve around the dilemmas of British Jewish characters. He is a Man Booker Prize winner.