England
the theme park
Andrew Marr reviews England, England by
Julian Barnes (Jonathan Cape)
hat
England has become a theme-park nation is a chattering-class cliché.
It is also at least partly true. There is no English crisis, but there
is a problem. In England, everything becomes a tradition, and that includes
the confection of tradition.
But the quantity of contemporary repackaging
is remarkable. It wraps itself around us all, like gaudy, omnipresent plastic
- knightly tournaments, Robin Hood rambles, Battle of Britain days, Shakespeare’s
Globe. This, of course is hardly unique to England. Other countries have
theme parks. But as any visitor to London will confirm, England itself
can feel like one.
Yet the English passion for dressing
up is matched by growing unease about nationhood. In his new novel, a frontrunner
for this year’s Booker Prize, Julian Barnes has taken this spirit of the
time and further distilled it into one of the oddest books you are likely
to read this year.
It’s what they call a romp, but it
is written in anger. There is a short first section, exquisitely done,
about a girl’s damaged childhood. There is a longer central satire in which
a tycoon takes over the Isle of Wight and turns it into a giant theme park
of English history. Then there is a brief fantasy about England in retreat,
a place of organic farms and the occasional steam locomotive.
The tone alters, disturbingly, from
one section to the next. The central part is more cartoon-like, more Tom
Sharpeish, than anything Barnes has done before. The colours are primary,
the outlines crude, the jokes obvious.
For people who like this sort of thing,
this is the sort of thing they like: the Isle of Wight’s buildings are
mostly demolished, then it gets a fake Parliament, peasants, fake London
fog, Di’s grave, Stonehenge, and so on. It is "everything you imagined
England to be, but more convenient, cleaner, friendlier, and more efficient".
It is also much more popular.
The heritage industry is an easy target.
Barnes doesn’t miss, though it was mildly amusing to read the breathless
promise on the back of my proof copy: "Huge full colour advertising ...
Splendid mobiles of the island ... 18-copy dump-bin and header ... Author
tour." Next stop, the Julian Barnes Experience?
By the final section, the tone has
shifted again. Old England suffers economic collapse. The Scots buy the
northern counties and the Welsh, Shropshire and Herefordshire. Scheming
Europeans isolate England from the continent. By which time, I felt, Barnes’s
satire had curdled into an exhibition of self-pity. Then the English turn
ruralist, and the mood changes again.
Barnes’s deep theme is the search for
authenticity. What is real? Is it what we think we know of our history,
what we think we remember? A world of mimicry and falsity threatens life
itself, Barnes argues: it cuts away at our capacity for seriousness.
In a key passage, one character explodes:
"Look what’s happened to Old England. It stopped believing in things ...
it lost seriousness." The search for authenticity, in an increasingly unreal
world, is worth it. It’s the search for life itself.
Nothing could be odder than such a
cartoonish romp whose real concern is seriousness. But this is both ambitious
and serious - real, if you like. Dive at those dump-bins.
Julian Barnes: His new book is a
romp, written in anger PHOTOGRAPH: JOHN REARDON
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