James Thurber once wrote of an elderly male relative who wore an unfortunate hat making him look like a sensitive gentleman persuaded against his will to take part in a game of charades. This is rather how Julian Barnes looks, sporting his curious new novel: for the most part a silly and uninteresting farce that seems to owe more to Tom Sharpe and Michael Dobbs than any of modern fiction's cool, Continental practitioners. 

It promises to be an elegant meditation on the nature of England and Englishness - as well as history and authenticity - and the solvent for this is to be a dystopian fantasy about a spectacular new tourist state invented by an autocratic media magnate, Sir Jack Pitman. 

Sir Jack buys up the Isle of Wight and transforms it into a scaled-down cyber-England with scale replicas of each and every English landmark worth seeing: a Tower of London, a Sherwood Forest complete with actors playing Merrie Men, a Buckingham Palace, with real Royals waving from the balcony; all within easy reach of each other with a proper modern infrastructure of transport, hotels, air conditioning, double-glazing, etc. But far from being a heritage resort, England, England (as it is named) becomes a thriving and dynamic state with full membership of the EU. It exemplifies the nationhood of the future, while the mother country, politically marginalised and deprived of trade and tourist income, regresses into disrepair. 

This fable is informed by the life of Martha Cochrane, a woman who is whimsically appointed by Sir Jack as the project's Official Cynic at the design stage: who also overthrows Sir Jack to gain control of the island after a passionate affair with another of his executives. 

The first part shows Martha's childhood in the idyllic rural England of her memory, in which she remembers a Counties of England jigsaw puzzle, and a be
loved father who deserts her. The third section shows an ageing Martha returning to a neglected Old England which has become a tatty and parodic Arcady. 

Those sections are charming and deft. But the middle part - the vision of England, England itself presided over by the buffoonish Big Brother Sir Jack - is heavy-handed satire, with dull and derivative Baudrillardian musings on simulacra, and, frankly, some pretty disappointing writing. It is as if Barnes's sensibility is bored by the naff heritage theme-park it has forced itself to inhabit. 

And once again, Barnes breaks Kingsley Amis's modest and sensible rule about never allowing one character to laugh at another character's jokes. In Talking It Over (1991), we were repeatedly assured that one figure, Oliver, was wonderfully funny and charming, when his direct speech made him sound like a dreadful prat. Here, Martha' s lover Paul delights her by doing an impression of a mallard: "'Quack quack.' 'Paul, stop it.' 'Quack. Quack. Quack.' He saw Martha on the cusp of laughter." Earlier, in bed together, Paul's raillery has the same happy effect: "'Don't. You're killing me.' Laughing on her back felt almost unhealthy." Stop it, Mr Barnes, don't. 

The dénouement comes when Martha is able to blackmail Sir Jack for visiting a brothel catering for specialised requirements - a moment of Rabelaisian comedy that the cool and fastidious Barnes cannot plausibly bring off. 

But why did he want to bring it off in the first place? Why did he want to bring his formidable talents to writing what is essentially a middlebrow romp? It is a mystery. 
 

© Associated Newspapers Ltd., 24 August 1998
This Is London