Dogsticks logo  
    Home        Book Reviews        Music        Photos        Kayaking Videos        Videos with Music        oBlog        Links        Contact    


Book Reviews - Review 336

Choose a category for a list of reviews. Notes | Books I Couldn't Finish | Random Review

Latest | Fiction | Science | Biography / Memoir | History | Music | Miscellaneous | All

Search Reviews: Whole Words Author/Title Only Include Unfinished Books

Julian Barnes


England, England

Category: Fiction | Published: 1998 | Review Added: 08-12-2015

Rating: 2 - I'd give it a miss if I were you

Julian Barnes' writing can tread a fine line between cleverness and preciousness. Normally his novels incorporate enough of the stuff of ordinary human experience to sustain the reader through the odd stretch of pompous intellectual waffle. His natural mode of writing is analytical and introspective, and his fiction is at his best when it focusses on the nuances of his characters' emotional lives.

By contrast, when he looks outwards, and aims for worldly irony, he is less sure-footed. This is overwhelmingly the case with England, England, his only novel-length foray into satire. It deals with a scheme by an ultra-successful entrepreneur, Sir Jack Pitman, to make an English "theme park" out of the Isle of Wight. The idea is that foreign tourists will get all the attractions of a visit to England within a stone's throw of each other, and the island will be populated by actors playing up to national stereotypes (village policemen, Morris dancers, "Robin Hood", etc.). It will be an "experience" of England more enveloping, and more convenient, than the real thing. Indeed, who will need the real England if its best bits can be siphoned off into a small replica?

Sure enough, once Pitman's plan is realised and successful, the original England declines into being an economic backwater — reverting, in the process, to the quaint unselfconsciousness that Barnes implies was its essence, and the one thing Pitman could never reproduce.

The novel seeks to deal with profound issues of authenticity and national identity. The problem is that its concept is so contrived, so dictated by a single idea, that it provides no scope for the touch of realism on which effective satire depends. Without that, it becomes impossible to say exactly what is being satirised. The mercenary nature of big business? But Jack Pitman is not like any businessman I've come across: he hums Beethoven and speaks in the allusional rococo sentences of a pretentious art critic. (Almost all the characters in England, England speak like art critics: does Barnes never hear ordinary people talking?)

Is he satirising the vacuous modern leisure industry? But there is nothing vacuous about Jack Pitman's project: on the contrary, it is self-conscious and sophisticated, and something he wants to see succeed for its own sake (rather than, as a real businessman would, for the sake of money and power). Is he satirising uneducated people's hunger for experience they can call authentic? If so, he's going for a soft target, and it's hard to sympathise with such a condescending perspective.

Perhaps the novel should be interpreted as fantasy rather than satire. But fantasy requires suspension of disbelief, and the unrelenting archness of Barnes' writing never lets us forget that we are being presented with a conceit. That wouldn't matter in a three-minute comedy sketch, but a novel that one can't believe in, at any level, gets tiring to read very quickly.

The main problem, which crops up in many of Barnes' works, but which here is central, is that he does not truly engage with the life of the world. He doesn't contrast the many varieties of human character and experience, and his understanding of politics and economics, for a writer so interested in history as a concept, is surprisingly naïve. For the most part, England, England reads like the work of an intellectually precocious but unworldly undergraduate, showing off to his clever friends with in-jokes and shallow cultural references. One wouldn't guess that its writer was a successful Metropolitan novelist in his sixth decade.

Few of Barnes' novels are without their flaws, but this is the first I've read that is an overall failure. Just one feature partially redeems it, and that is the story of its main character, Martha Cochrane, who is Sir Jack Pitman's "Special Consultant". Under a feistily cynical exterior, she is a melancholy idealist, and the falsity of the Isle of Wight project that she ends up running is the correlative of her private feeling of lacking a spiritual centre. Her relationships disappoint her, and she is the one character who is both believable and likeable. Unfortunately, though, she occupies the sidelines of a novel primarily conceived to stretch an idea to breaking point, to which character and narrative seem to have been applied as afterthoughts.

[Return to top]

(c) Copyright 2002-2022