England, England by Julian Barnes
My rating: 3 of 5 stars
England, England is a book about an island created to capture the essence of England, ostensibly to attract tourists and make its founders a lot of money. This “fake” England, we are assured, is more “real” that the country it’s based on, as it distills Englishness down to its recognizable parts and puts them all in the same, convenient place. England, we are told, is its history, artifacts, and iconography. This is pop-culture for those who thought Any Warhol wasn’t being in the least ironic.
A book like this, then, is itself about England, via its characters: a self made man and an almost-but-not-quite-bitterly cynical woman. The former is the visionary who builds England, England, the latter his assistant who keeps his vision grounded in reality. Sir Jack Pitman, not content with having it all, decides he wants to be in charge of it all as well, and thanks to Miss Cochrane, he only earns that right after having been defeated by his own hubris.
So then there’s the fake England, and the stereotypical English, and that’s all well and good. But a thing becomes calcified as soon as it gets a label, and that’s what happened to England itself, thanks to the non-English. Anyone and everyone who’s ever had this Englishness foisted on them has an idea of what England is, and they’re all most certainly wrong. England isn’t English anymore than China is merely Chinese. According to Barnes, Derrida was wrong.
And while, I, personally, got bored reading this after a while, thanks to long passages of introspection about love and the meaning of life, I did like how the book’s coda sums up what it means for a place to have a fabric and texture—once the real England has its history, artifacts, and iconography drained from it, it ceases to be part of the world-context that defines it, and ironically, once again becomes utterly English.
My apologies for prattling on like a sophomore struggling to write a book report. I desperately want to enjoy Julian Barnes’ books. I thought A Sense of an Ending was excellent, and I found Flaubert’s Parrot quite challenging—so my head is looking for ways to justify my having read England, England. It got me thinking, I suppose, so kudos for that. I just wish it was shorter—blame my American shallow attention span.