Moreover, the imposition of deferential manners upon the citizens of this never-land has brought about an unhealthy suppression of feelings that are now bursting out in a contagion of drunken, domestic and murderous violence. Instead of stability, there is disorder. In place of peace, there is paranoia.

All this forms the background to the relationship between Kevern Cohen and Ailinn Solomons (the conjunction of vaguely north-European forenames and Jewish-sounding surnames is another mandatory aspect of this carefully blurred society). But how did it — and they — evolve? Few direct answers are given beyond recollections such as Kevern's about how his parents "jumped out of their skins whenever they heard footsteps outside", but increasingly heavy hints are skilfully threaded into the plot.

Swimming against the tide, Kevern and Ailinn scour their fragmented memories for clues about their — as it turns out, similar — origins. Indeed, they are encouraged to do so by one Esme Nussbaum, a "monitor of the Public Mood", who is on a mission to restore some balance to the community, ravaged as it is by a kind of postdiluvian anxiety. A permanent union between Ailinn and Kevern, Esme believes, could help to enable a formerly excluded group of people to take their place in the new society.

But Esme's wish for the couple's fruitfulness seems a forlorn one. Kevern, in particular, has "not been put on earth to fling his seed around". His rationalisation of this voluntary infecundity is a typically outlandish Jacobsonian intellectual conceit. It is, Kevern argues, the greatest of revenges: the removal from the earth's face of the enemy that tyrants need in order to thrive. 

As the narrative progresses, the possibility that WHAT HAPPENED, IF IT HAPPENED was a simulacrum of the Holocaust, grows stronger. This is implicit in the short, single-page evocations of past atrocities inserted between chapters. As it is in the scapegoating and mindless conspiracy-theorising that creep into the dialogue. Then there is talk of a people who negotiate "disproportionate" prisoner exchanges and make "the planet quake" should anyone "let one of their number perish", familiar items on contemporary charge-sheets against Israel. Here, again, the hostility is directed not at the Jewish state per se but at "foreigners" who "had what they called a country only by taking someone else's".

For all the anonymity, it is clear that the Jew is Jacobson's symbol of persecuted peoples and misunderstood minorities. Yet this in no way renders his powerful theme incapable of universal application. Neither does it impede his imaginative demonstration of how dangerous it can be to forget that both love and hatred flow from the same source — human nature.