Redback

by Howard Jacobson

By the winner of the 2010 Man Booker Prize.

Karl Leon Forelock is a product of the northern English town of Partington (the wettest spot in Europe) and a graduate with a double starred first in the Moral Decencies from Malapert college, Cambridge. Sent to Sydney on a CIA bursary on a mission to teach the Australians how to live, Leon quickly discovers that there are some natives who believe that they have an education to pass on in return. But it is at the hands of the women in Australia that Leon receives his most painful, and on occasions his most pleasurable, lessons.

Meanwhile, in a foul, dilapidated bush privy, way up in the Bogong high plains, the Redback sucks her teeth and waits her turn...

Genres: Fiction

368 pages, Paperback

First published June 28, 1987

About the author

Howard Jacobson was born in Manchester, England, and educated at Cambridge. His many novels include The Mighty Walzer (winner of the Bollinger Everyman Wodehouse Prize), Who’s Sorry Now? and Kalooki Nights (both longlisted for the Man Booker Prize), and, most recently, The Act of Love. Jacobson is also a respected critic and broadcaster, and writes a weekly column for the Independent. He lives in London.

Profile of Howard Jacobson in The New York Times.

“The book's appeal to Jewish readers is obvious, but like all great Jewish art — the paintings of Marc Chagall, the books of Saul Bellow, the films of Woody Allen — it is Jacobson's use of the Jewish experience to explain the greater human one that sets it apart. Who among us is so certain of our identity? Who hasn't been asked, "What's your background" and hesitated, even for a split second, to answer their inquisitor? Howard Jacobson's The Finkler Question forces us to ask that of ourselves, and that's why it's a must read, no matter what your background.”—-David Sax, NPR.

Reviews

[Tony · Rating 4 out of 5]

Probably my favourite Jacobson book. Read many moons ago but still holds fond memories. Great situation comedy.

Maybe time for a re-read.

[Glass River]

Howard Jacobson began writing novels late in life. Born in Manchester in 1942, the young Howard went to grammar school and read English at Cambridge, where he was taught by the martinet F. R. Leavis. He did well enough to be invited on board. His subsequent academic career started in Cambridge, diverted to Sydney University and ended at Wolverhampton Polytechnic: a downward trajectory which Jacobson seems to gloomily find fit for such as him. Aged forty-one, he published his first novel, Coming from Behind (saucy title). Since then, he has come a long way. He won the Man Booker prize in 2010, for The Finkler Question, and commemorated his triumph with the funniest winner’s speech ever heard at the Guildhall.
Redback chronicles Jacobson’s time Down Under. It will be some way into the narrative before most English readers feel the full Antipodean force of the enigmatic title. But, to begin with, it’s enough to register the suggestions of painful sunburn, humiliation and pommy gaucherie. The peculiarly nasty nature of Anglo–Australian relations (as lampooned by Jacobson) is outlined in a symbolic prelude to the action. An unnamed Oxford undergraduate meets a wholesome young Australian girl with powerful mandibles and an MA in fine art – ‘let’s give her an ordinary Australian name, say . . . Desley’. She and the undergraduate initially hit it off. But in his rooms later that evening, after a heavy supper of pasta and fish, the chemistry goes wrong and the sexual act misfires. He wakes in the morning,
relieved to discover that the girl has gone; but an odd feeling, an unaccustomed tingling of the skin, a sensation of discomfort and unease around the heart, causes him, still on his back, to cast an eye over his person, whereupon he finds that she has left a little memento of herself – a Freudian gift, hard, compact, warm, in its own way perfectly formed, a faecal offering smelling of fish and pasta (of tagliatelle marinara) – nestling amongst the soft hairs of his chest, only inches from his gaping mouth.
The unfortunate undergraduate unburdens this tale to his friends. One amongst them – Leon Forelock – finds himself particularly intrigued, having never imagined that Australia contained girls ‘capable of such erudition, athleticism and aplomb’.
Redback is not a novel for those with an easily tickled gag reflex. Like swimming, it should for safety’s sake be undertaken at least two hours after eating. The nauseating tone of the work established, it continues in the form of an envenomed monologue, following the random progress of the hapless Leon. The Forelocks hail from ‘Partington’, the wettest spot in Europe. Leon goes to Malapert College, Cambridge, and wins a double-starred first in moral decencies. As the only non-homosexual attending the university, he is recruited by the CIA for covert service in Australia. There, it is his mission to dam the creeping tide of ‘Tristanism’, cultural sophistication that is sapping the country’s robust philistinism. It’s also an opportunity to crap on Aussies, which Leon enthusiastically does by setting up front organisations such as CACA – ‘Campaign for a Cleaner Australia’.
The climax of Leon’s Australian ordeal comes in a second encounter with his fatal woman, Desley, on the Bogong High Plains, where she is building a feminist community. But again the chemistry goes wrong. Having fortified himself with three bottles of Shiraz, Leon bursts, Mellors-like, into the lodge and announces: ‘I have come back to fuck you, Desley.’ She is nothing loath, but tells him first to use the non-sexist locution ‘fuck with you’. Leon finds he has an inbuilt cultural incapacity to make the necessary verbal adjustment, so she tells him to ‘fuck off’. Leon obediently stumbles out of the lodge into a storm. He takes refuge in a wooden dunny where, patiently, the redback’s mandibles await him. The redback, we at last learn, is a poisonous spider, sister species to the better-known black widow. She (the sex is significant – only the females are venomous) bites Leon’s exposed, dangling and unrequited member. Not funny ha, ha – but funny ouch, ouch.

[Cosmo Crawley · Rating 2 out of 5]

The names of characters in satirical novels should be apt but plausible. Waugh got it exactly right in The Loved One, his satire on the American funeral industry, when he named the doomed lovers Mr Joyboy and Miss Thanatagenos. Dickens also scored a direct hit with Mr Skimpole in Bleak House. The narrator and protagonist of this novel is named Forelock, which would have been most acceptable but for Jacobson’s insistence on telling us over and over again in the first chapter that the Forelocks were naturally deferential. “Show, don’t tell,” is a cliche of good fiction writing that writers would do well to observe more often.

The plot concerns a young man from a bleak town in the north of England who travels to Australia in the early 1960s on a CIA scholarship to spread conservative ideology. The satire on the narrator’s damp birthplace owes much to Michael Palin’s ripping yarn about the Testing of Eric Olthwaite, and the section on Australian academia owes more than a little to Monty Python’s sketch about the University of Woolloomooloo. While Jacobson gives us all the standard jokes about Australia’s dangerous wildlife, the novel mostly consists of in-jokes about Australian celebrities, academics and political figures of the 1960s which must be incomprehensible to the greater part of the world’s readers. There’s also the narrator’s sexual misadventures (he is bitten on the penis by a spider which causes a three-week long erection) which aren’t quite as entertaining as those depicted by Tom Sharpe and Benny Hill on their bad days. I give it two stars because I did get most of the Australian in-jokes and found some of them funny.

[Natasha Anastasiou · Rating 3 out of 5]

Το βιβλίο του «Η Αράχνη» αφηγείται την ιστορία ενός άνδρα που ονομάζεται Ρούπερτ, ο οποίος ξεκινά μια σχέση με μια πολύ νεότερη γυναίκα, πλοηγώντας σε θέματα επιθυμίας, εμμονής και της πολυπλοκότητας της ηλικίας και της ταυτότητας. Το μυθιστόρημα διερευνά τις περιπλοκές της σύγχρονης αγάπης και τη συχνά παράλογη φύση των ανθρώπινων σχέσεων.
Μου άρεσε αρκετά το βιβλίο, ειδικά για τις αιχμηρές ιδέες του για την αγάπη, την εμμονή και την πολυπλοκότητα της ηλικίας, προσφέροντας μια προκλητική ματιά στις ανθρώπινες σχέσεις. Από την άλλη δεν μου άρεσε το πώς τα συναισθηματικά βάθη των χαρακτήρων ένιωθα μερικές φορές υπανάπτυκτα, αφήνοντάς με αποσυνδεδεμένο από τους αγώνες τους. Είναι όμως ένα βιβλίο που αξίζει να το πιάσεις στα χέρια σου !

[Andy Carter · Rating 3 out of 5]

Jacobsen is a very gifted writer, with a great command of language. However, I wouldn’t agree with the claim that he is one of the funniest writers around, or, if he is, the humour was largely lost on me. Also I found the main character unsympathetic.

[Tweeting · Rating 4 out of 5]

One of the funniest books I've ever read. But maybe you have to be an Australian with a background in academia to appreciate some of the best jokes.

[John Kitcher · Rating 4 out of 5]

This book is laugh out loud funny. A charming, funny book about a Pom living in Australia. Very well written.

[Alison · Rating 1 out of 5]

Could not finish this.

[Jeremy · Rating 3 out of 5]

It had its moments but they were few and far between. Still an enjoyable throwback to an Australia that no longer exists

[Simon Rosenbaum · Rating 3 out of 5]

I read this in the late eighties or early nineties and remember thinking it was really good. I still enjoyed parts of it up to a point but the prose seems quite strange to me now. Imagine if a carry on film had been written by someone like Tom Stoppard. Also you keep waiting for the scene when he gets bitten (the whole point of the book) but you have to wait until almost the end of the book for that to happen which is a bit frustrating.

[Sira]

Really tightly packed satire. I actually found this book kind of exhausting, but I don't know if that has more to do with how tired my brain is, now that I'm in the final stage of my PhD. In any case, it's heading off to the Oxfam bookshop on the next trip.

[Bex · Rating 1 out of 5]

I will give this book half a star because it taught me, finally, the art of and reason for skim-reading.

[Barry · Rating 3 out of 5]

Not bad. Not up to the standard of his latest. His 'political' attacks, including on women, are a little crude.

[Bialey · Rating 1 out of 5]

Read this book years ago and was not impressed, way too contrived for my liking.

[Kenneth · Rating 3 out of 5]

I registered a book at BookCrossing.com!
http://www.BookCrossing.com/journal/14523190