The Medium is the Message

An old varsity connection recently requested that we become friends on Facebook and I noticed that the symbol or logo - as opposed to a photograph - he used to identify himself was a hammer breaking the Microsoft flag.

The hammer clearly denoted the communist one and the flag presumably represented evil capitalism. But it was a very hi-tech image and I couldn't help wondering why the world's second-most-vitriolic anti-Americans (the first obviously being radical Muslims) always happily employ American technology and/or actually live in the big Satan. They don't go and work in, say, Minsk, Chengdu or Douala and start a workers' revolt from there.

Seeing The Social Network will no doubt fuel their anti-capitalism because it doesn't paint a very flattering portrait of how the latest social revolution came about, one in which you are free to mention your sore nose or share the latest brilliant idea.

Students of Screenwriting 101 will also be delighted to point out that the film starts with a big no-no: a very long conversation. Ah, but the lecturer might reply, it's because David Fincher (Seven, Fight Club) is directing: he can get away with it. Which is probably true.

His film also doesn't really have a protagonist. Instead its focus is on the founder of Facebook, Mark Zuckerberg (Jesse Eisenberg), the youngest billionaire on the planet. In that initial conversation he proves himself to be a completely charmless little misogynist. Sharp, but charmless, badly dressed and unattractive. So much so that his girlfriend tells him to get lost and doesn't change her mind when he becomes ultra-rich. Maybe the point is that in the world of business and/or IT there are only absentee protagonists.

Almost half of the film consists of lawsuits being conducted against Zuckerberg, surrounded by men and women in stiff grey suits according to their sex, while he maintains his shapeless jeans and those hideous single-strap plastic sandals sports people used to (or maybe still) wear.

What was his crime? Well, according to the film it's a bit of a grey area. It's not like he stole anyone's idea directly. Yes, there already was an electronic network connecting students on campus, but it wasn't being used to decide who's the hottest girl around, or which animal she resembles. For that, Mr Zuckerberg had the brains to write the program exclusively.

So, not a nice piece of work, our Mr Zuckerberg, about whose background we learn absolutely zip.

But every Bill Gates needs a couple of co-founders who will become faceless co-billionaires. Enter Sean Parker, the founder of the failed Napster and, according to the film, a real little shit. Justin Timberlake has become surprisingly adept at playing these morally vacant characters, but according to Vanity Fair the person he portrays so well is not such a turd.

Sure, he likes to party hard - and Fincher is a master at making that kind of American decadence look extremely attractive - but he knows how to sell and realise an idea and, according to the real Parker, "it's technology, not business or government, that's the driving force behind large-scale societal shifts".

What he neglects to say is that nothing just pops up of out nowhere and changes the world, but he doesn't come across as the spineless little slimeball that we see in the movie either. What he has, of course, is exactly what Zuckerberg doesn't, namely social skills, charm.

But if the real Parker is not being portrayed accurately, why should we believe that Zuckerberg is? What exactly would screenwriting heavyweight Aaron Sorkin (West Wing) and Fincher be trying to say? Obviously the film wasn't made without covering all legal loopholes, which Zuckerberg seems pretty good at finding, so what does this story boil down to in the end? A bit of business history, perhaps, a little mythmaking? Maybe not.

Someone playing the aforementioned Gates is featured in a cameo and we all know that the richest man in the world, along with the second richest, Warren Buffett, is giving away the equivalent of small countries' GDP to causes such as the eradication of polio and malaria, and the fight against HIV/Aids.

Judging by this film, one wouldn't be surprised if Zuckerberg were to sell all our personal details to the CIA or whoever else wants to watch us and has enough money, like those Chinese securocrats who think they're fighting a winning battle against a technology - and therefore consciousness - that renders them positively dinosaurian.

But at least The Social Network isn't one of those nauseating college romances, and maybe Fincher used the oldest trick in the cinematic book to convince Zuckerberg, whether face to face or not, that this film needed to be made.

Maybe he, like Parker, appealed to the young billionaire's desperate need for social acceptance, and this time round they both won, since the film is making a killing at the box office.

Neil Sonnekus

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A Passage in India

Jaipur, Rajasthan's capital, is not the place to go to if you want to catch a glimpse of India's headlong rush into modernity. A fixture on the tourist circuit, it is best known for its pink-walled old city, its 18th-century forts, its traditional jewellery and technicolour textiles. But for a few days each January, the city provides a conduit to the people and debates at the very heart of contemporary literature.

Set in the grounds of a beautiful heritage property, Diggi Palace, the DSC Jaipur Literature Festival has grown rapidly in the past six years from a small, regional affair to one of international stature that has attracted the likes of Salman Rushdie and Ian McEwan.

Last year, it attracted more than 20 000 people and more than 200 speakers. The five days of reading and panel discussions have become an increasingly important stop for writers looking to showcase their work, and for agents and publishers on the lookout for the Next Big Thing.

Crucially, though, it maintains its local feel. As anyone who has been to Hay knows, the problem with the major lit festivals is that they are usually just a vehicle to sell books and the closest they get to any excitement is when the author fluffs his lines while reading an extract from his latest work.

There's often a sense of "we must pull in the celebrities at any price" - as when Hay spent $168 000 to have Bill Clinton speak in 2001. By contrast, Jaipur has remained largely non-commercial. No one is paid a fee and, more to the point, the entire festival is free to attend. Instead of relying on ticket sales, the fest has managed to shame or cajole institutions like Merrill Lynch into becoming major sponsors, along with the usual suspects like the British Council.

To cap it off, excellent Indian cuisine is served to thousands of participants free of charge and superb live music is performed into the small hours every night. Authors mingle informally with the public too, while there is plenty of networking.

Jaipur is directed by the respected author William Dalrymple, and this January he's managed to attract Orhan Pamuk, JM Coetzee, Kiran Desai, Richard Ford, Anthony Beever, Jay McInerney, Mohsin Hamid, Monica Ali, Jung Chang, Fatima Bhutto, Candace Bushnell and Germaine Greer - to name only a few - to Diggi Palace, along with book lovers from all over Asia and abroad.

It's definitely worth checking out, not least to see whether Tina Brown was right when she called it "the greatest literary show on earth".

Melissa de Villiers

* The Jaipur Literature Festival runs from 21 - 25 January 2011. For more details, go to: http://jaipurliteraturefestival.org/

A Singular Man

Back in Johannesburg there was a little grey accountant who helped struggling artists because he was a good man and because he had always wanted to study literature. Cyril Fisher dutifully became an accountant, as his father had instructed, but many years later he got his degree in English literature by correspondence through the University of South Africa and proudly displayed it in his beige office.

The only other picture in that room I can recall is a photograph of his wife. She wanted to go to the Alps before they grew too old, but she became ill in Austria and was only going to go to one hospital and that was the Rosebank Clinic back in the City of Gold. After her operation the doctor made his inspection and angrily asked one of the nurses where the old lady's drip was.

Up the ill Mrs Fisher piped and said: "He's sitting right here."

How did I come to hear this story? Mr Fisher told it me, smiling fondly. So I can understand that a sweet old man like that might sit down in his chair one night, only a few months after his beloved partner had died, and simply expire due to a lack of interest, missing his beautiful wife, his heart breaking.

But I find it a bit difficult to process that a good-looking man in his mid-50s - and a professor of literature, to further tenuously link the above story - will decide to do himself in because his partner has died. Does it matter that he's gay? Well, this is one of the questions Tom Ford's adaptation of the Christopher Isherwood novel, A Single Man, asks.

Colin Firth's George describes his intention as somewhat "melodramatic", but he's going to proceed to blow his head off anyway, and he does so with all the obsessive attention to detail that probably made Ford one of the top fashion designers in the world. (Talent, of course, helps too.) A pathologist might have told the director that the barrel should aim at the brain, not the spine, but that's a minor detail.

Obviously we sit there wondering when George is going to do himself in, which adds a kind of languid tension to the whole affair.

More importantly, is Ford saying that gays are melodramatic? Maybe just a little, and then there's enough self-deprecation to balance it out with statements like "I'm English, we like to be wet and cold." But, as George says, he doesn't want to live in a world "without sentiment". Not sentimentality, mind, sentiment. There's a difference.

Who does George run to when he hears the terrible news of his lover's death in a car accident? He runs to Charley, played by a slightly heavier-than-usual Julianne Moore. It's a very beautiful scene. There is lovely music (by Abel Korzeniowski), there is rain, there is no speech and there is grief.

But she is his ex, even sexually. And, like so many fag hags, she is still secretly in love with him, still hoping he's going to turn straight so that they can have a "real" relationship, she later confesses - high on gin, wealth and indolence. Naturally it's a statement that infuriates him, but they are friends and he forgives her.

At worst, it seems like the film is aimed very much at a straight market, or at best wants to include it, for the many shots of a floating naked man never show what Keith Richards calls his todger, and even the poster suggests that this could be a film about the relationship between George and Charley. That really is secondary.

Moore's performance of a brash, superficial woman is spot-on and halfway towards what she should have been in Savage Grace. But where are his gay friends? He doesn't seem to have any, and this is not a criticism. One of the important things the film seems to be saying is that George might as well have been married and settled down in suburbia with his loving partner, Jim, played warmly and convincingly by Matthew Goode.

All they really wanted to do was live happily ever after. The only difference is that he's gay and can't stomach the straight neighbours' son, a little corporate soldier in the making. Yet he likes the little girl and so a portrait of a type starts emerging. He likes women, as long as he doesn't have to sleep with them, and he loathes the kind of straight men corporate America was breeding after the war. Fair enough.

And then there is a very telling scene where he walks with an admiring student and watches a man play tennis. There are the usual slow-motion close-ups on pecs and abdomen, but he's still a grieving man. He's not interested in sex right now, but he can still look, which is beyond straight or gay. It's just plain masculine. It's also incredibly gauche.

As for the suicide scene, it's one of the drollest bits of humour seen on film in a long time. George is so busy fussing about things - this feels like Ford the obsessive compulsive going on about details again - that he, well, see it for yourself.

There's even a bit of toilet humour when he literally sits on one, still wearing his tie, watching the neighbours.

Should a straight man play a gay man? There is a camp (pun only half intended) that says it's a no-no and they have a point, much like we don't expect to see a white man playing Othello anymore. But an interesting thing happens with Firth. He is one of the most "natural" actors around, yet here he seems fraught with contradictions, tension; even his gait seems awkward, contrived. It's either a happy accident or a very clever bit of casting.

But what the film does manage to achieve, after all the artifice, is something quite touching. It manages to surpass its own "gayness", its own neuroses, melodramas and deprecations, and boil down to a grieving man (this is not giving the plot away entirely) who can finally give up his sentimentality without forfeiting his sentiment.

In short, it's a moving portrait of a man whose mildness, in the final analysis, is very different to that of the kind and late Mr Fisher.

Neil Sonnekus

* Next week, The Social Network

The Real Slap's Still in the Closet

I wanted to like this book. I really did. It sounded so intriguing. Reviewers either adored it or hated it - there seemed not to be a moderate reaction among them.

And then there were the prizes. Not only did the novel win Christos Tsiolkas the Commonwealth Writers' Award for Best Novel 2009, it made the Booker longlist this year as well.

Stephen Romei, editor of The Australian Literary Review, called it "a rare quadrella in publishing: a page turner that sells a lot of copies, gets great reviews and then wins literary awards".

So where did we go wrong, The Slap and I?

Okay, there's a dynamite narrative hook at the start - the slapping of a brattish four-year-old (who is still being breastfed, incidentally) at a barbecue in suburban Melbourne.

Within a day the parents of the slapped child have the slapper arrested. But then the plot broadens, spooling out over nearly 500 pages in its ambitious attempt to lay out modern, liberal, multicultural Australia across the rack.

Several factors traduce the book's ambitions. There's the soap structure, for starters; with each chapter, Tsiolkas shifts his point of view to a different character who was present at the barbecue - a Greek immigrant in his 70s, an ex-hippy-turned-suburban-mum, an adolescent girl in the first flush of love, an Aboriginal convert to Islam.

Most of these characters are unpleasant in a wide variety of ways, but that's not the problem - they're cardboard cutouts that talk in cliches. Although suburban violence and anger is one of the book's key themes, everyone seems to get angry in exactly the same tone, even in the same words. Perhaps this is Tsiolkas's point, but the repetition means he doesn't make it very effectively.

Characters are constantly describing how they long to smash their fists "into the face staring back at him" or to smash the kid against the wall", or "to smash a cricket bat...once, twice, a hundred times into the little fucker's head, made him pulp and blood."

Or, just for variation: "Harry did not take his eyes off the cunt. If he could only smash his fists into her pretty face."

Then there are the sex scenes, which are cringe-making. This is porn sex, really, a seemingly endless loop of thrusting cocks, grateful cunts, moans and groans. No matter how hardcore the experience, Tsiolkas's women lap it up - after one particularly relentless session the man apologises to his wife and she meekly replies, "but I like making love to you."

Tsiolkas, who is gay, told an interviewer from the London Times that he relied on advice for these scenes from three women writer friends, one of whom read an early draft and told him: "The women are orgasming like men. Women don't come that quickly. Dial it back."

Blimey. So this is the dialled-back version.

And the prose is too often clunky. On holiday in Indonesia, one character is struck by the "gentle smiles" of the locals, the "cheer and fearlessness of the children". Or: "She did not look her age but looked fantastic."

Somewhere within The Slap there's a thoughtful state-of-the-nation novel trying to get out, one that highlights the casual racism that lurks within Australian culture; the tensions within an uneasily assimilated multicultural society; the contradictions of liberalism.

But the quality of the writing too often lets it down. And, although Tsiolkas assembles a diverse cast, what he doesn't do is make their ethnicity or class count for very much, or investigate in any detail these different worlds.

He's good at plot twists and turns, and that's what kept me reading until the end - on that level, the book delivers the same kind of satisfaction one gets from a well-crafted airport thriller. But "a tour de force...a novel of immense power and scope"? (Colm Toibin)

Slap me and wake me up. I must be dreaming.

Melissa de Villiers

Peace Be Upon You

One of the reasons why I liked Ridley Scott's Body of Lies was that it showed Leonardo DiCaprio actually playing a sexual being, not just someone who has the obligatory romantic interest.

That the object of his desire was a Muslim woman was telling. His character had in fact been seduced by the Middle East, for all its complexities, which is a far cry from the usual American denial of showing how "our" boys are suffering in one of those wars instead of asking why they're actually there in the first place.

Films like The Hurt Locker.

In fact, a salient but understated point Scott makes is that the Middle East has an erotic charge about it, and it's worth investigating that, along with all the other geopolitical considerations.

Once people start falling in love across races, cultures and religions life becomes infinitely more interesting - and complex. On a micro-scale, you can't get more political than getting married.

But in the two films under discussion today there is no love lost, let alone glimpsed or even desired. In the first, A Prophet, which won the Grand Prize of the Jury at Cannes, a Bafta, the Golden Globe and has been rightly nominated for a foreign Oscar, there is a warning, a cautionary.

What makes it so powerful is that Malik (Tahar Rahim) is a nonentity when Jacques Audiard's film begins. The only thing that distinguishes him from other French people is that he speaks Arabic, but he comes from the streets. He has no parents, no political or religions affiliations.

But the first criminal and symbolic act he has to perform for the Corsican mob inside is kill an Arab - who might snitch on them - to ensure his own safety. This is virtually the only time we see him feeling anything, not because the man is an Arab, but because Malik is not a killer. So he does what has to be done, but then that man comes to "visit" him thereafter, to guide him, mentor him, praising God.

Though a very long movie, the shift from Malik's complete subservience to utter power in six years is almost imperceptible, his face showing very little again.

And if the implicitly Catholic mob, as represented by Niels Arestrup's obscenely brilliant prison don, are always violent towards Malik, then the Muslims offer him something that is central to their faith. Family. And I don't mean the family of man, or men, I mean his friend is dying of cancer and offers Malik his beautiful wife and child. What street urchin would say no?

So if ever there was an allegory on how Islam became radicalised, this is it. It's very scary, and very necessary.

On completely the other end of the scale is Chris Morris's scathing satire Four Lions. Note, it is not a comedy, it is a satire, which means it is there to highlight the absurdities of something. In this case it is a quartet of blithering, fundamentalist Muslims idiots with Sheffield accents.

Using all the techniques of farce and slapstick, Morris sends up some of their more ridiculous ideas, often using news-like camera zooms.

On a domestic level, when the imam comes to visit the leader of the revolutionaries, Waj (Kayvan Novak), he has to shield his eyes from seeing Waj's (very beautiful) wife, Sophia (Preeya Kalidas). The scene ends up in a suburban water-pistol fight between the married couple and their imam because he finds it repulsive to be in the same room as a woman, but otherwise he's a peaceful sort who doesn't intend blowing people up.

Sophia, however, discusses her husband's martyrdom as if they're planning a Sunday morning picnic.

Extremism takes a knock, literally, when Barry (Nigel Lindsay) suggests they should blow up a mosque so that they can radicalise and mobilise more Muslims. Waj says that is akin to hitting yourself and finally persuades Barry to do just that, giving himself a blood nose.

But always there is the reality that bombs are bombs and they can completely spoil your day and, even though Morris only half covers himself from a fatwa by showing just how stupidly dogmatic the English are as well, one wonders what Muslims would think of this film. Would they laugh as much as Westerners? It would be interesting.

On a purely formal level, this outrageous flick starts losing steam towards the end, but it has more laughs in it than most Hollywood comedies put together anyway.

And then there is the question of who has the last word. The satirist or the historian? It is quite conceivable that the latter might one day come to the disturbing conclusion that the man who almost single-handedly dragged Islam into the spotlit glare of global scrutiny, George W Bush, was also a blithering, fundamentalist idiot.

Neil Sonnekus

Going to Town

Ben Affleck's directorial debut, Gone Baby Gone, was a revelation. It showed maturity, courage and intelligence. It also showed that he knows how to pull a performance, in that case from his brother, Casey.

Furthermore, he had a fine understanding of how menace works, and he was competing against another contemporaneous masterpiece of menace set in Boston: Martin Scorsese's Oscar-winning The Departed.

All of that skill is still apparent in The Town, but it's kind of watered down.

This could be because he is rather self-consciously hauling his own, rather awkward tall frame through the lens, but he is still pulling those performances from others - notably Rebecca Hall as Claire, Blake Lively as a hard-done-by Krista and Jeremy Renner, fresh from his acclaimed showing in The Hurt Locker, as her brother, James.

Anyway, the titular town is Charlestown, a Boston suburb which apparently produces the most bank robbers anywhere. So it is not a very upmarket kind of place, yet Affleck (pardon the pun) goes to town with expensive aerial shots of the city and the titular suburb.

It may be a small point, but it's wrong. These people don't see life from above, they see it from down below, like Scorsese's characters. They're too busy in their cesspool of survival to have a bird, God or Trump's eye view of the whole affair.

Those are the negatives, bar one.

On the positive side there is the rather engaging relationship between Doug (Affleck) and Claire, a bank manager who is briefly taken hostage by him during a robbery (he's behind a skeleton mask) but treated humanely.

If his effort to engage her afterwards is somewhat contrived, then one does get a sense of the tentativeness of a new affair. Initially, of course, he only wants to know whether she saw anything identifiable about the thieves, since she's been questioned by the cops.

The only thing she saw of the robbers was one of their tattoos, belonging to the always dangerous James, on the back of his neck. So along he comes, in broad daylight, and joins them at an open air restaurant, the tattoo quite visible.

It's masterly. Will she she see it or not? Has he been spying on his virtual blood brother or not?

Doug's history is economically referred to and made integral to the story, and the fact that the kingpin of these parts fronts as a florist, played by the prunish Pete Postlethwaite, is another excellent touch.

Moreover, Affleck the director has a wonderfully realistic streak to him in that some of his characters actually get hit in the crossfire; if someone gets smacked over the head with a rifle's butt they actually bleed; if Jon Hamm's FBI Agent Frawley blasts a getaway car's tyres with a shotgun they actually burst.

How refreshing.

So this is not the worst or most most mediocre heist film you'll ever see, far from it, but there is a danger that it could become a cult movie in the distant future for all the wrong reasons.

A bunch of aliens might worship its hidden message that, forsooth, we only see Affleck and new "it" actor Hamm every third day of this story, for both of them sport such a designer stubble virtually all the time, and that just ain't real.

Neil Sonnekus

Soul Food

It's supposed to be an oxymoron, a German comedy, even though Oscar-nominated Oliver Schmitz assures me that he makes a living in Berlin as a director of TV comedies when he isn't making serious dramas about black South Africans.

But then Soul Kitchen goes a step further and turns out to be a romantic comedy. Could this be possible? Could it possibly work? Well, yes, actually. Rather well. And the reason why it works might well be the same as why the German national football team is so much more interesting these days.

That is, it no longer consists of only Schweinsteigers, Schillers and Schumachers. Not only are there a couple of Polish names in there now, but also quite a few Turkish ones, even an African. In other words, the team is no longer purely European. The old gene pool is being given a shake-up.

Hamburg-based director Fatih Akin is of Turkish extraction - his parents were probably so-called guest labourers (Gastarbeiter) - and his leading actor and fellow scriptwriter is clearly not echt Deutsch with a Greek name like Adam Bousdoukos.

So the latter as Zinos Kazantsakis has a restaurant that sells bad food to appreciative people. The only problem is that he has a brother, Illias, who's a criminal, played by Moritz Bleibtreu, who always has that air of Fassbinderian decadence and intelligence about him.

Zinos also has a purely Aryan girlfriend, Pheline Roggan, who is as precious (but okay) as the day is long; and he has an elderly tenant, Sokrates (Demir Gokgol), who verbally abuses him and never pays the rent. Such is life.

Everything seems to go wrong when Zinos slips a disc in his back and spends the rest of the movie walking like, as Illias says about someone else, he has a carrot up his arse. It's very funny because Zinos just happens to look a lot like Jim Morrison of The Doors - in other words, a god.

That is about the only thing the title of the movie and the song by that band has in common, nor does it really deliver on its promise of being a soul music-themed movie. It's way too inclusive for that. There's everything from the stuff you'll hear in elevators to the beats you'll get in an Istanbul disco.

And just to add to the tasty stew, there is Zinos's precious chef. Birol Unel as Shayn Weiss is every millilitre the kitchen dictator, stylish fringe, camp rage and all; and who wouldn't fall for Zinos's Turkish physio, Anna (Dorka Gryllus)?

If the film is predictable in its romance and plot - Aryan property developer wants to take over by means foul - and if the device as to how Zinos wins back his restaurant after brother Illias gambles it away is utterly contrived, then it scores in the areas that count.

That is, not only is it a celebration of the new world citizen, the migrant; it is also a reminder that some of us are - or once were - young, wild, beautiful and divinely cuckoo.

Neil Sonnekus

* Not to blow our Yamaha too much, but do note that we featured an interview of new Man Booker prizewinner Howard Jacobson a week before he won that hallowed prize for The Finkler Question. Now is that sharp or is it sharp?

The Finkler Question

Furious. Acerbic. Unflinching.

Even the briefest glance at Howard Jacobson's face would seem to explain why these are the words often used to describe his work (the other one is "funny"). Surely those craggy, prophet-like features must never be more than a twitch away from a thunderous scowl? Journalist Allison Pearson once described him as looking like "God after a bad day at the bookmakers", and there's definitely something there that suggests grumpiness on an epic scale.

Luckily, Jacobson turns out to be an interviewer's delight - easy-going, open and brimful of bonhomie. This sunniness is at least partly a consequence of his latest novel, The Finkler Question, reaching the shortlist for the prestigious Man Booker Prize.

Literary gongs have been a bit of a sore point with him until now, even though his books get glowing reviews (Jonathan Safran Foer called him "a great, great writer") and he is often compared to Philip Roth. Yet come the awards ceremonies...nada.

"I've had this reputation as a good writer who is constantly overlooked, and I've been quite fed up with it," he tells me. "If you're identified with a certain kind of non-achievement, it counts against you in the end. So now I feel that particular spell has been broken, and I'm pleased about that."

Of course, there is no accounting for judges' tastes. But there is always the possibility that his novels trade in subjects still off-limits to some, like humour and the Holocaust - the main conceit behind Kalooki Nights (2006). Or perhaps it's because they deal with other issues that cut uncomfortably close to the bone, like British anti-Semitism.

"My father always said: 'Keep your head down, stay schtum.' In the UK, you must demonstrate your remove from Jewishness if you want to feel more English. That's not the case in America, where you often get the feeling that Jewish life is almost synonymous with general cultural life. But over here, while we're not disrespected or disregarded, the Jewish way of thinking and speaking has simply not shaped the culture in the same way and probably never will."

That aside, there is no doubt The Finkler Question is a triumph - funny, clever, and dark. Its protagonist, Julian Treslove, is a typical Jacobson creation: a middle-aged man much given to angst, falling heavily in love and regarding his male friends as rivals. He's also been the victim of an anti-Semitic attack. Or so he thinks. The problem is, he's not actually Jewish, though his two best friends are - Sam Finkler, philosopher and author, and Libor Secvik, his former teacher.

Sam and Libor are both newly widowed, and Julian's feeling left out - while the other two debate Zionism and mourn their wives, all he's got is an uninspiring job as a celebrity lookalike and a brace of sons he doesn't care to remember. So he decides to learn Hebrew, studies Jewish history, meets a Jewish woman and gets a job in a Jewish museum. But can all this satisfy the need to belong?

This is Jacobson's eleventh novel and, like all its predecessors, it uses humour to drive home his discursive, digressive but always thoughtful interrogations of what it means to be a Jew in England.

"I have always argued for the primacy of comedy in fiction. I don't mean jokes - I mean the illumination of another way of seeing, the sudden turning of an action on its head; not to make light of it but to enrich it."

Such as his depiction of one particularly woebegone character who keeps a blog recording his attempts to regrow a foreskin. Or the bitingly satirical scenes where Finkler spearheads a group called "Ashamed Jews", whose raison d'etre is their grievance towards Israel.

Jacobson's speaking to me from his converted loft in London's Soho, which he shares with his third wife, television producer Jenny de Yong. It's a seemingly natural habitat for a sophisticated, successful author - yet his roots are in working-class, Jewish Manchester. His late father was a "market trading, taxi-driving magician", his mother raised their children at home.

"We were Jewish in a very secular way. We were expected to have bar mitzvas, but we didn't know what it was, really. Our parents got a bit upset when we went out with non-Jewish girls - there was a feeling that you weren't meant to 'marry out'. There was no sense of the kind of Orthodoxy that is in the air at the moment."

Both his parents had an abiding love for culture: his father for opera, his mother for books, and that led Jacobson to pursue a degree at Cambridge. He later taught literature at various universities, but says that his academic career ran aground in the late Seventies. "I neglected it because I wanted to be a writer. I didn't do all the things you were supposed to do."

Yet his literary career took a while to get going. His first novel, Coming From Behind - often described as a Jewish Lucky Jim - was not published until 1983, when he was in his 40s. Once he'd got over the fact that he was no Tolstoy, he finally found his voice.

After that, all he wanted was success as a writer and it still matters to him more than anything, even though he's busier than ever. He's about to publish a collection of the columns he writes for The Independent, he's just made a film about British art for Channel Four, and he's also well into his next novel.

And, of course, there's the upcoming Man Booker. How does he stand the anticipation?

"My mother, who is in her late 80s and pessimistic - Jewishly pessimistic - gave me a piece of her mind on that. 'Don't hope for much. Enjoy it now! Let this be enough.' It's good advice, actually, because right now I do feel blessed."

Melissa de Villiers