England, England is Julian Barnes's first novel in six years. With most authors this would be a big enough gap to cause fans to worry about writer's block, psychological implosion, problems with booze, drugs, girlfriends, the tax man, mystery viruses . . . Of course, what readers wish for their favourite writers to avoid is what the journalist half-hopes to find. 

On my way to Lola's restaurant in Islington, I was mulling over how a really surprising Barnes interview would begin. He would turn up two hours late, swigging freely from a bottle of Jack Daniels. He would do a line of cocaine at the table and thrust a hand up a waitress's skirt before smacking face-forward into the gazpacho. He would talk loudly about how much he disliked intelligent women. He would punch somebody - preferably, from the journalistic point of view, me. 

I arrived five minutes early, only to find Barnes being shown to the table in front of me. So there went my exclusive. Not that I was surprised - Barnes isn't the face-down-in-the-gazpacho type of interviewee, or writer, or man. And while the six-year gap between novels is a fact, it's a misleading one, since in those years Barnes has published a book of linked short stories about France (1996's Cross Channel) and a book of reportage from the New Yorker (1995's Letters from London). In addition he has had a movie made of his first novel, Metroland, and has had his name plastered all over the papers thanks to his falling out with his ex-friend Martin Amis. This caused me to wonder out loud whether the way the book world is covered by newspapers has changed. 

"Without pulling what Kingsley [Amis] used bizarrely to call his 'senior writer status', that is one thing that's different. It's gone with the corporatisation of publishing. I was first published by a small, independent publishing house called Jonathan Cape. It had been a small, independent publishing house for 75 years. You assumed that the natural path of being a fiction writer was that you wrote one book, and then you wrote another, and you gradually built up some sort of reputation, and then you became well known, or you didn't, and that it was a long-term relationship. 

"They gave you £3,500 for your first novel, and they would expect to sell, say, 1,200 copies at the most, of which 600 would be bought by public libraries, and you in turn would be happy with that, because you wanted to be a writer, you wanted to write novels. I think I did one reading for Metroland, no readings for Before She Met Me. The publicity side of it was just starting up." 

Barnes is still published by Jonathan Cape, which has changed hands twice since Metroland came out in 1980: first the company was bought by Random House, the international conglomerate owned by Si Newhouse; then Newhouse sold Random House to Bertelsmann, the even bigger German conglomerate. This is one of many changes that have happened in publishing in the past couple of decades. 

If the business has become a casino, it is not one at which Barnes plays: he controversially, indeed near unprecedentedly, has the same publisher, the same agent and the same wife as he did when his first book came out. (It perhaps helps that the agent and the wife are the same person, Pat Kavanagh.) Barnes could extract colossal advances if he wanted - a couple of years ago his paperback publishers, Picador, took him out to dinner to celebrate the sale of his millionth British paperback. But it's not the sort of thing he would do. 

Barnes was born in 1946 in Leicester, a fact that still appears on the back of his books, though the family moved to London when he was six weeks old. (He continues to support Leicester City FC: "I'm sometimes rung up by the local paper when Leicester get to Wembley and asked what the score's going to be.") Both his parents were schoolteachers; his brother is a philosophy professor at the University of Geneva. Barnes studied Russian at school and at Oxford, read for the bar, drifted into literary journalism, and by the standards of his slightly younger colleagues - Ian McEwan, Graham Swift and Martin Amis - was slow to get into print: he published his first book at the age of 34. "For a long time, I didn't think I would be a writer," he remembers. "It's not natural to be a writer, it's not natural to be an artist, it's not something that's normal in our society. Most writers aren't the sons of other writers. There's no training for it." 

Eighteen years later, Barnes is the author of eight brilliantly diverse novels, and a great deal of first-rate journalism. One of the striking things about The Cost of Letters, a recent book canvassing writers' opinions about their profession's relationship with money, was how dismissive most of them were about the journalism that pays their gas bills. Barnes isn't like that. "Lots of writers aren't good at journalism and hate doing it. I like doing it. If you compare, say, Roth and Updike, who seem to me novelists of comparable stature, one happens to do an enormous amount of journalism and be fantastically facile, in the best sense, and the other doesn't, and would think that was breaking some contract with art, and yet that doesn't affect their novels." 

It is Barnes's novels that have made him famous, not just in this country but all around the world. He is one of the writers who have earned England its international reputation for contemporary literature - although it's a reputation you won't learn about by reading book pages in the UK press. "The British tendency is to run down their home-grown culture, though when you get to France or Germany they say, 'We haven't got any novelists - that's why we buy yours.' From the outside, Britain is seen as having a thriving literary, pictorial and musical culture." This self-deprecation is "partly to do with national character, partly with the fact that if you're British you can read foreign fiction in your own language." 

Why does he think British writing should be enjoying such a boom? "The theory usually floated when you're abroad is that it's to do with the break-up of the British Empire. The idea is that the infusion of ex-empire, ex-colonial, ex-whatever you call them writers has reinvigorated the British novel, made it more diverse. I'm not so sure I buy that because I'm not sure that's how writers are influenced. It's true that there's more looking outward in the British novel generally than there was - though as soon as you say that you have to think of the exceptions, like Burgess and Greene and Durrell. 

"But you would expect the Empire thing to work the other way, so that when one third of the globe was pink, writers would think they could address a third of the world. I tend to go for the accident theory." 

England, England is Barnes's first book to be dedicated primarily to the subject of Englishness. When I floated the idea that it was a "condition of England" book, Barnes demurred, preferring to say that it was "an idea-of-England novel, rather than a state-of-England novel". In any case, it is a book about England's relationship with the past and especially with the process of creative and selective remembering that has been dubbed "the invention of tradition". 

The novel's principal setting is the Isle of Wight (the site of Barnes's first family holiday as a child). "It was one of the first places in Great Britain to be perverted by becoming a tourist destination. It was a rather undeveloped, old-fashioned, quite primitive offshore island until sunbathing became fashionable. Then Queen Victoria and Tennyson went there, and that did for it. Sea-bathing became all the rage. People went there for their holidays, and then built bungalows. The traditional industries of smuggling and boat-building lost out to tourism." 

In England, England this process of de-authentification is taken a stage further by the billionaire entrepreneur Sir Jack Pitman: he buys the whole island and turns it into a theme park. The theme is, of course, England. There are Beefeaters, Robin Hood and his Merry Men, Dr Johnson at the Cheshire Cheese, the SAS, smugglers, black taxis, Stonehenge, Anne Hathaway's cottage, the departure of the Mayflower, and, of course, the Royal Family. The Isle of Wight changes its name to England, England. Meanwhile, the country that used to be England - Anglia, as it is now known - becomes a different kind of theme park, a de-industrialised fantasy of its past. 

As Barnes was writing England, England, reality was doing its best to catch up. "The last issue of the Art Newspaper had an article about a project in Italy backed by a large Italian financier, Saudi money and so on, to create 1,000 acres outside Orvieto, what they're calling Roma Vetus, Old Rome. Reconstructing old buildings but in much better shape - the Coliseum, the Circus Maximus. They're going to have chariot races, it's going to be lit by torches. 

"The idea is that these things replace the original, just as in Las Vegas there's a hotel project which is going to be Venice, the centre of Venice. In some ways it's completely logical. Over 90 per cent of Americans don't have passports - most Americans don't travel, which we tend to forget. So why not go to Vegas and see Venice? You don't have to worry about the food and the currency and not speaking the language. And it's limited: that's Venice, you've seen Venice, so now you can go and gamble." 

He half gleefully, half appalledly cites the new laser technology that would make it possible to replicate the Elgin marbles cheaply, and the public anger in Italy when it was discovered that some vandalised statues in the Borghese gardens were in fact copies. 

"So it seems rich and timely," Barnes concludes. It does indeed. The gap between finishing the book and publishing it is narrower than it has ever been before for Barnes: he wanted the paperback to come out in time for the millennium. It's a smart move: the novel has memorable characters and sentences, but its main impact will be through its penetrating ideas. We will be hearing a lot more about England, England.