Julian Barnes is a former lexicographer and journalist whose novels have earned that most elusive cachet - critical acclaim from both the English and French side of the Channel. His 1984 work, "Flaubert's Parrot", is part travelogue, part literary criticism: its narrator, Geoffrey Braithwaite, journeys through France and his own autobiographical detail, painting a novel in a pastiche of narrative forms.Barnes felt he had found a substantial vehicle in Braithwaite and considered having him write a guide to the bible - an acerbic, agnostic travelogue through its pages. Instead, he developed "A History of the World in 10 Chapters", beginning with the conceit of seeing history as re-beginning with Noah's Ark.
Barnes' first chapter presents the unexpurgated story of the Ark. How could one small ship have carried the Earth's vast variety of animal life? He has Noah as admiral of a flotilla of ships. The bible, here, is propaganda, fudging the truth in favour of a good story. He creates a paradigm for historical enquiry: all history is partial, is told from a particular perspective; all history involves editing out what the historian sees as chaff; if the bible doesn't give you the whole story, who can you believe. History, then, is a perspective, never a fundamentalist truth.
History, of course, is written by the victors, is written from the perspective of those with the power to claim that their vision of the truth is the only coherent, logical one. While the image of all formal world histories is that the author has encapsulated the truth of human life, Barnes presents history as a personal interpretation. His history of the Ark is written from the perspective of the powerless. It is the voice of the dispossessed, made no less emphatic by its fictional form.
Barnes goes on to emphasise that while historians present their material as a logical continuity, history is, in fact, a series of discontinuities and conflicting perspectives. He leaps straight into a second maritime chapter, its narrator being a guide on a cruise liner, taking tourists on history tours around the Mediterranean. History, here, belongs to those who have the time, money and curiosity to buy it in packaged form. The vessel is hijacked by terrorists, and the tour guide is left to explain his own role in this little footnote to history.
Surely law can establish truth? Barnes now explores a medieval court case, reducing the pursuit of truth to so much sophistry, to be bought and sold according to political will and power. He reintroduces the Ark's stowaways - can they claim a god-given purpose if their only purpose seems to be the destruction of man's creations?
A young woman recognises that all life is interconnected, that there is a world ecology which links the lies about Santa Claus to the lies about nuclear power. She seeks escape to sea and pursuit of an island paradise ... only to be haunted by the false fantasies of her dreams and her delusions that she can find safety.
Barnes returns again and again to various cultural distinctions between the 'clean' and the 'unclean', who shall live, who shall die, who shall have power, who shall be consumed?
He exhumes the story behind a famous French painting of a Napoleonic shipwreck, posing the question of how you turn disaster into art, and thence into triumph. Art, too, presents a snapshot of history, capturing a moment. But Barnes demonstrates that art, like history, can be critiqued, can be deconstructed, can be shown to be only an opinion, an illusion rather than a certainty.
History, then, is an anachronistic concept. It is a claim to know god's hand. But if even the bible, the supposed word of god, is partial and partisan, who can claim to know the hand of god?
A Victorian lady ascends Mount Ararat in search of the remains of the Ark. A survivor of the Titanic is tormented by a sceptical youth. Human remains are found on Ararat. Could this be Noah?
Barnes spins together, if not a series of short stories then a melange of essays. He treats history as an assemblage of information and constructs a novel as a juxtaposition of ideas. Its an incisive and disorienting experience. As a reader, you search for themes and continuity. The narrative is accessible to the reader only in the way that history is accessible to the archaeologist. You have to dig for it then make sense of it.
This is a superbly funny, provocative work. Despite its intellectual sophistication, it is remarkably accessible. It is a good read, itself an ironic commentary on the pretensions, cerebral flatulence, and impenetrability of so much history, or, indeed, art or literary criticism.
He concludes with a 'half' chapter, a conclusion in which he sets aside his own thoughts in parenthesis, delivering a personal vision of heaven as a statement that if history is presented as an attempt to understand the past, should we not be attempting to understand the future? Should we not be trying to decide where we are going, how we want humanity to evolve? It's a plea to put politics and overt values back at the heart of history rather than to pretend that it represents some sort of neutral stance, some sort of expansive balance.
And he's leaving you, as reader, to add your own parenthetical addendum to the novel, to piece together your own values and perceptions and those excerpts from your own personal history which have shaped who you think you are. Exciting. Stimulating. Highly entertaining.
A History of the World in 10 1/2 Chapters is generally described as a novel, and therefore I expected it to conform to this definition. This was not the case. In fact it is difficult to categorise it at all, and the best I can come up with is that it is a collection of linked short stories or essays. The 10 1/2 Chapters referred to in the title largely share the theme of shipwreck and survival, and while they may form a possible history of the world when read as a whole, they generally focus on isolated and unconnected events, and each one can be enjoyed as a separate story.
The first 'chapter', entitled "The Stowaway" is an alternate account of the Noah's ark story, and its humour and irreverence sets the tone for the rest of the book. Further chapters include a story of a cruise ship being hijacked, an epistolary story of the production of the film in the Amazon and a fascinating essay on a painting of a shipwreck, juxtaposed with an account of the actual shipwreck, and commenting on the nature of art.
For me however, the best chapters were the final one, "The Dream", a hilarious and thought-provoking interpretation of heaven, and the Parenthesis (The half-chapter), which contains possibly the most beautiful ruminations on the nature of love I have ever read.
Whether this book is a novel, a collection of stories, or something else entirely, it is a wonderful and original work, and on the very rare occasions when the writing is less than brilliant, the originality more than compensates. It certainly wasn't the book I expected it to be, but whatever it is, it's outstanding and inspired.
