Shimi Carmelli, 91, formerly proprietor of Shimi’s of Stanmore, now a part-time fortune teller for the widows of north London, can remember everything and wishes that he could not. Beryl Dusinberry – in her own head the Princess Schweppessodowasser – a little older, is in a daily fight against forgetting; names are the worst, even those of her loathsome sons, MPs for rival parties. She tries to keep her mind ticking over by cataloguing all of her lost lovers – “the man who woke up in Beryl’s arms hadn’t betrayed his wife, he had forgotten he had a wife”. Her ardent A-Z rarely makes it past the Bs.
Shimi and Beryl live on opposite sides of Finchley Road as it runs up past Swiss Cottage towards Hampstead. Howard Jacobson’s wonderful novel, his 16th, brings them inevitably, slowly together to discover a telling connection rooted in the past. The twin creations, who come fully to life in their first appearances here – she on a late-night phone call to the wrong son telling him not to wear a T-shirt, “a vest”, on television; he bending at the knee to pick up his pack of dropped cards, delighting the widows with his agility – are perfect Jacobson heroes. They allow him to display all his virtuoso way with words, while indulging that deep understanding of the rival cultural memory of the last century carried in the heads of Shimi – a Jew “never able to make light of anything” – and the war widow Beryl.
No other novelist writing in Britain could dramatise this nonagenarian love story with greater verve and tenderness, while never forgetting that this is a resplendently comedic form. Jacobson gives his characters alternating chapters until their accidental union, each setting fragments of the complex past against the present.
Beryl, once a teacher of English literature to girls of refinement, tries to piece together her life story from her diaries, her “journal d’amour”, with the help of her two carers, a big-boned Ugandan woman, Euphoria, and her Moldovan night nurse, Nastya (or “Nastier” as she can’t help but think of her). The pair are caricatures in her head, but never in Jacobson’s. When Beryl isn’t trying to remember she loses herself in her embroidery, which is laced with subconscious fears: “despising indistinctness, [she] stitches with a merciless precision whatever her fingers want her to stitch, though the only thing her fingers want to stitch is death…”
Shimi, meanwhile, is in thrall not only to a buried shame of his past – plagued by the knowledge that he used to be excited to try on his dying mother’s commodious bloomers – but also to the urgent and frequent demands of his bladder. He plots his habitual walks around familiar streets and parks in the careful knowledge that he is never far from a public convenience. He is, nevertheless, the last of north London’s eligible bachelors in the eyes of his several admirers, by which they mean he is the “last man able to do up his own buttons, walk without aid of a frame and speak without spitting”.
Jacobson has clearly done half a lifetime of looking at the streets in which Shimi wanders and through which Beryl is driven. One of the many joys of this book is the way it effortlessly captures the distinctive atmosphere of Finchley Road itself, a dual carriageway that is punctuated with outsize supermarkets but retains the ghosts of a 1950s high street. Beryl lives in a red-brick mansion block, Shimi above the Fing Ho Chinese Banquet Restaurant, one of those stubborn eateries that have resisted change long enough to become institutions.
Jacobson uses this cityscape to reinforce the understanding that both Beryl and Shimi rail against in different and quietly heroic ways: that ultimately we are not given a choice what our sadistic memory has us remember – unless, that is, we find some new neural pathways to wander along in the present.
• Live a Little by Howard Jacobson is published by Jonathan Cape (£18.99). To order a copy go to guardianbookshop.com or call 0330 333 6846. Free UK p&p over £15, online orders only. Phone orders min p&p of £1.99
