t’s hard to imagine that the commissioning editors for the new Hogarth Shakespeare series had to deliberate for long before deciding which contemporary novelist should take on The Merchant of Venice, the tragicomedy that gave us the most (in)famous Jewish character in literature. Howard Jacobson, the undisputed British master of black comedies featuring Jewish characters, relocates the drama to Cheshire’s flashy “golden triangle”, though the novel – his 14th – is far from a straightforward retelling. Rather, it is a provocative interrogation of Shakespeare’s play, and most particularly of its antagonist, Shylock, whose name has passed into common usage as a byword for usury and malice or, conversely, antisemitism.

“Shylock: victim or villain?” is up there with “Is Hamlet mad?” as a contender for the most well-worn (and reductive) exam question to be thrown at students of English literature down the decades. “To argue about Shylock is to argue about a matter of contemporary concern,” Jacobson wrote in an essay for the BBC last autumn to accompany his Imagine documentary Shylock’s Ghost, another attempt to answer that hoary old question in a different form. “In our interviews we found no two people who agreed about the nature of Shylock’s inner life.”His solution in the novel is to let the man speak for himself. Not some approximate fictional counterpart, but the real Shylock, who appears one day in a Gatley cemetery, cut loose from the constraints of his story and apparently able to transcend time and place like the Wandering Jew of legend. Jacobson’s Shylock becomes the house guest of wealthy art collector Simon Strulovitch, a resolutely non-observant Jew, except in the matter of his only daughter’s liaisons:

“So if we don’t do Jewish things, and we don’t have Jewish friends, and we don’t eat Jewish food, and we don’t celebrate Jewish festivals, why must I go out with Jewish boys?” she asked him later.

“For the sake of continuity,” he told her.

“What do you want me to continue?”

“The thing you were born to be.”

“Jewish?”

“Continuous.”’
Strulovitch’s troubles with his daughter, Beatrice, echo those of Shylock with Jessica in the original. The more the two men converse, the more Strulovitch realises he has in common with his enigmatic guest, despite his own antipathy to the outward forms of faith. These sharp-edged and bitterly funny verbal fencing matches between the two men, the modern and eternal versions of each other, are the engine of the novel, as they pursue the questions of what it means to call oneself a Jew, or to be called one by others.

Around these exchanges a plot unfolds that mirrors Shakespeare’s play, though with subtle differences of emphasis. Portia becomes Plurabelle, an heiress turned reality TV star; Antonio is D’Anton, a gay art importer and philanthropist with a long-standing enmity towards Strulovitch. Beatrice runs off to Venice with a footballer notorious for giving Nazi salutes on the pitch, an elopement in which Plurabelle and D’Anton are complicit, and which occasions a nice twist on the demand for a pound of flesh. But alongside Shylock and Strulovitch, these characters appear as comic types, gaudy tabloid cartoons who converse in quips. Even Beatrice, though she has some witty lines, exists mainly to embody a particular attitude of defiance; only D’Anton, with his stubborn self-sacrifice and barely repressed prejudice, hints at hidden depths.
But all this only serves to push Shylock further into the spotlight. The novel is, after all, a study of his inner life, and loses something of its verve every time he is off stage, rather like Shakespeare’s original; no other character can compete with him for interest. While his debates with Strulovitch thrash out the nature of vengeance, duty, fatherhood and history, it is through the ongoing dialogue he keeps up with his deceased wife, Leah, that Jacobson softens him, allowing him a humanity – and a tragedy – beyond victim or villain.

“These Jews, Leah, these Jews! They don’t know whether to cry for me, disown me or explain me,” he laments late in the book. Jacobson has opted for the latter, and has done so with empathy and affection, offering a partial vindication but withholding resolution. Shylock resists explanation, and that is why he continues to fascinate.