England, England
by Julian Barnes
Cape £15.99 pp288

Barnes fabricates all this with complete assurance. Critics complain that he lacks "style", meaning a pack of showy mannerisms that make his writing instantly recognisable. What he has, much more importantly, is mastery of his craft. He could, you feel, write anything from Holy Scripture to dog-food ads, and it would be perfect of its kind. His trickery has never been more zestfully put to work than in Sir Jack's kitsch dreamland. 

But the Isle of Wight project is ultimately just a slapstick facade behind which the story's graver purposes congregate. Despite its light touch, England, England is a philosophical novel about authenticity and the idea of the replica. The centre of its seriousness is Martha Cochrane, a sceptical, thirtyish executive on Sir Jack's staff. The book starts with her childhood, or, rather, its absence. To the question "What's your first memory?" she always replies "I don't remember," because she realises that memory is a continuous process of replication and distortion. There can, we are reminded, be no access to a primal moment, either with people or with nations remembering their history. Sir Jack's fakery is no more fake than ideas of the past that we accept as real. 

Personal authenticity, Martha comes to suspect, is itself bogus. Most people (as one of Sir Jack's hired intellectuals points out) steal much of what they are. Words, gestures, ideas, are largely mimicry. "I just think you're real, and you make me feel real," Martha's lover Paul naively blurts. But Barnes ensures that we know better. His backward glance at Paul's and Martha's adolescence shows them constructing their sexuality out of replicas and imitations. Paul, like many males, discovered girls in magazines and kept them, neatly torn out, in manila envelopes under his mattress. Martha's ideals are subtler but no less fake. Never having met a man to match her dream, she concentrates, in love-making, on the dream, and ignores, as far as possible, the male who is pleasuring her. "I'm still here," Paul pants reproachfully as he gamely does his bit. 

Even if she noticed him, she could not, the novel insinuates, really notice him. We fabricate our perceptions of others out of our own mental images and replicas - which is why we disagree so much about what other people are like. Sir Jack's acolytes all detect a different meaning in his eyes. But which is true, or whether there is a truth, remains unknowable. 

As the story unwinds, the replica motif keeps breaking out in unexpected places, like a musical theme. There is even a replica smell - a perfume called Petersburg, created from the rediscovered blending-book of a parfumier fashionable in tsarist Russia. One of Martha's memories, or fake memories, is of a village horticultural show she was taken to as a child, where competitors had to exhibit a clutch of identical vegetables - runner beans, or pea-pods, or carrots. It seems irrelevant, until it dawns on you that Barnes is gesturing towards evolution, and its dependence on cells replicating themselves and mutating. So Sir Jack's duplicate historical sites are justified, it seems, by the principle that drives all life. 

Our dilemma, as the novel frames it, is that we yearn to be authentic although we cannot help being fakes. The plot's nemesis, at once comic and unsettling, comes when Sir Jack's tame islanders start to live their parts for real. The Battle of Britain pilots insist on sleeping in their hangars, in case the Germans should attack during off-duty hours. Robin Hood's merry men disdain the excellent canteen facilities and hunt for their food, wreaking havoc in the Animal Heritage Park. Visitors to the Cheddar Cheese complain that Dr Johnson wolfs his food, stinks, and is rude about Americans - just like Dr Johnson. Reprimands, in this case, prove fruitless. Inextricably involved in his role-model's melancholy madness, the hapless actor is removed to an institution. 

The one flaw in this bravura performance is Sir Jack. It would be unfair to reveal just what degradation overwhelms him. Barnes's plotting is far too enjoyable to spoil. On a thematic level, admittedly, what happens to him is apt. It hinges on his obsession with babyhood, and so exposes, in grotesque and obscene detail, the impossibility of returning to a primal moment. But in other respects his humiliation seems too facile for so original a book. Ever since Dickens, the English novel has presented businessmen as freaks. Dombey, Bounderby, Murdstone and their fictional successors drive home the lesson that business success is coarse and vulgar and ruins your sensibilities. That this has damaged and divided our culture seems indisputable. E M Forster warned against it in Howards End. Barnes had an opportunity, with Sir Jack, of reversing the trend. In The Porcupine, he extended sympathy to another despised species - a fallen East European party leader. But Sir Jack gets no such quarter. He exists on a lower plane than the other characters: a figure from carnival. 

Most novelists, of course, would feel pleased if they had created a figure half as convincing as Sir Jack. To criticise him is to acknowledge that Barnes is way ahead of the pack, and raises higher expectations. There is no more intelligent writer on the literary scene. In this novel, he is also moving. The elegiac finale shows Martha returning to old England, now renamed Anglia. Ruined by the loss of its tourist trade, and abandoned by all who can afford to leave, it has slipped back into pastoral simplicity. Four-lane highways peter out in woodland. Suburbs have been bulldozed. The church once more fosters the life of the spirit, where Martha at last finds solace for her scepticism. This pre-industrial idyll is just as much a simulation as Sir Jack's tawdry theme-park - and Barnes makes sure we realise that. But he has written nothing more poignant and enticing. It is a fitting end to a commanding imaginative achievement.