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Man Booker veteran Howard Jacobson has earned himself a place on this year’s short-list with his disturbing dystopian fiction, J. The 300-page novel is marketed as being “talked about in the same breath as Nineteen Eighty-Four and Brave New World.” A newcomer to this genre, Jacobson’s world building is much more subtle than the dystopic tone of Nineteen Eighty-Four. Jacobson’s J is set in a world which, at first, represents more an off-kilter southern England in the 90s than an estranged and unreconcilable future. This is Jacobson’s main feat: the superficial familiarity which his fictional world affords the reader. But this familiarity is never allowed to establish itself fully; Jacobson’s spun out, perpetuating prose slowing introduces sinister discrepancies, weaving together a pervasive ominous tone through which the novel is filtered. Situated in the aftermath of some calamitous world event, referred to as “WHAT HAPPENED, IF IT HAPPENED”, the novel meditates on mankind’s collective and controlled memory, what happens to a population under the enforced strain of moral rigidity, and the chaos which ensues once the “enemy” is eradicated. J explores the impermanence of history and truth, its negation and erasure. J is a striking work of fiction, one which resonates unsettlingly in the possibilities of our reality. Jacobson’s prose operates like a web, spouting off in numerous metaphors, culminating in an eclectic whole. His writing retains his characteristic humour, albeit in its blackest form. It remains to be seen whether Jacobson’s intriguing mesh of fiction and politics will weigh in with Orwell and Huxley’s genre-defining oeuvres. In terms of its place in the dystopian canon, Jacobson approach is far more low-key than that of his predecessors. Yet his response is more localised, and a far more intricate study of the psychological responses humankind adopts when faced with catastrophe. Intriguing and disturbing, Jacobson may be onto his second Booker win.