Metroland

Barnes’s first novel, Metroland, is orthodox in technique and approach; divided into three parts, it is a variation on the traditional bildungsroman, or coming-of-age novel. In part 1, the narrator, Christopher Lloyd, and his close friend, Toni, grow up in 1963 in a north London suburb on the Metropolitan rail line (thus the title), pursuing the perennial adolescent dream of rebellion against parents, school, the middle class, and the establishment in general. Convinced of the superiority of French culture and consciously seeking answers to what they believe to be the larger questions of life, they choose to cultivate art, literature, and music in order to astound what they see as the bourgeoisie and its petty concerns.

Part 2, five years later, finds Christopher a student in Paris, the epitome of artistic bohemianism, particularly when compared to his life in Metroland. It is 1968, and French students are demonstrating and rioting in the streets for social and political causes. None of this touches Christopher; he is more concerned about his personal self-discovery than about changing or challenging the wider world.

Nine years later, in part 3, set in 1977, Christopher is back in Metroland, married to Marion, an Englishwoman of his own class, with a child, a mortgaged suburban house, and a nine-to-five job. Toni, still a rebel, chides Christopher for selling out to the enemy. Ironically, however, Christopher is content with life in Metroland. He consciously examines and questions his present circumstances but accepts their rewards and satisfactions.

Questioning and irony are continuing themes in all of Barnes’s novels, as is the absence of significant character development except for the leading figure. Toni, Christopher’s French girlfriend Annick, and Marion, his English wife, are not much more than supporting figures. Relationships are explored through Christopher’s narration alone, and Christopher finds himself, his questions, and his life of most concern and interest to him.

Before She Met Me

Before She Met Me is also a story of an individual’s attempt to relate to and understand his personal world. Graham Hendrick, a forty-year-old professor of history, has recently remarried. Now beginning a new life, happy with Ann, his new wife, and outwardly contented, both personally and professionally, Hendrick seems to be an older variation of Christopher and his self-satisfied middle-class existence. As in his first novel, Barnes includes a bohemian writer, Jack Lupton, as a foil for Hendrick’s respectable conformity.

Before they were married, Ann acted in several minor films, and after viewing one of them, Hendrick, the historian, begins to search out his wife’s past. At first his quest seems based on simple curiosity; soon, however, Ann’s history begins to take over Hendrick’s present life. Losing his professional objectivity as a historian, succumbing to jealousy, compulsively immersing himself in Ann’s past, blurring the distinction between the real Ann and her image on the screen, Hendrick becomes completely obsessed. Seeing the present as a world without causes, Hendrick finds his crusade in the past, and that crusade is no longer public but private. Bordering on the melodramatic, Before She Met Me is the story of the downward spiral of an individual who can no longer distinguish fantasy from reality. Did the love affairs Ann had on the screen replicate her private life off camera? Are her past love affairs continuing in the present?

Barnes poses the question, not only for Hendrick, caught up in his obsession, but also for the reader: What is reality, and can one discover the truth? Like Metroland, this novel has many comic and witty moments but ultimately ends tragically. Ann and Lupton had an affair that has since ended, but Hendrick, in his obsessive quest, falsely concludes that it continues; he murders Lupton and then, in Ann’s presence, he takes his own life. Although told in the third person, Before She Met Me centers on the plight of a single figure questioning his world. Hendrick and his compulsions dominate the novel: His first wife, their child, Ann, and Lupton are figures perceived through his persona.

Flaubert’s Parrot

With his third novel published under his own name, Flaubert’s Parrot, Barnes received considerable praise as a significant writer of fiction, less parochial in form and technique than most English novelists of his time. His first book published in the United States, Flaubert’s Parrot was the recipient of numerous prizes. It too is a novel of questions and obsessions that unite the past and present, but in its collage of literary techniques, it is not a traditional narrative novel, including as it does fiction, biography, history, and literary criticism. As in his earlier works, Barnes focuses on a single individual in the novel; Geoffrey Braithwaite is an English medical doctor in his sixties, a widower, with a long-standing interest in the French writer Gustave Flaubert. Barnes also has been a student of French and admirer of Flaubert, and early in Metroland Christopher reads a work by Flaubert; several critics have examined the possible relationships among the author and his fictional figures Braithwaite, Christopher, and Hendrick.

Told in the first person, Flaubert’s Parrot examines Braithwaite’s attempt to discover which of two different stuffed parrots on exhibit in competing Flaubert museums is the one that sat on Flaubert’s desk when he wrote his short story “Un Cœur simple” (“A Simple Heart”). In the story, an old servant, Félicité, is left after fifty years of service with only a parrot as a companion. When the parrot dies, Félicité has it stuffed. As her health fails, she confuses the parrot with the Holy Ghost, traditionally represented as a dove. On her deathbed she believes that she sees a giant parrot above her head. Braithwaite’s quest to determine which is the real parrot allows him, and Barnes, to pursue with wit and irony numerous aspects of Flaubert’s biography: his published works, including Madame Bovary (1857), his ideas for works he did not write, his travels, his use of animals in his writings, and his lovers. The novel includes chronologies, a dictionary, and an examination paper.

Flaubert’s Parrot is not concerned only with Braithwaite’s interest in Flaubert’s past and the two surviving stuffed parrots. As the doctor pursues Flaubert and his parrot, he also begins to reveal his own history. Braithwaite’s wife had frequently been unfaithful to him, as Emma Bovary was to her husband Charles, and she had eventually committed suicide. As Braithwaite explores the relationship between Flaubert and his fiction, seeking to know which is the real parrot, he also attempts to understand the realities of his own life and his connection with the fictional Charles Bovary. He becomes obsessive about discovering the truth of the parrots, but he is also obsessive about discovering his own truth. The difficulty, however, is that truth and reality are always elusive, and the discovery of a number of small realities does not result in the illumination of absolute truth. In the course of his discussions, Braithwaite muses on the incompetence even of specialists in ferreting out the truth; he criticizes a prominent scholar of Flaubert, whom he accuses of pronouncing French badly, of mistakenly identifying a portrait as Flaubert and of being unable to specify the color of Emma Bovary’s eyes.

Flaubert’s parrot, too, is seen as a symbol of this dichotomy of fact and fiction. The parrot can utter human sounds, but only by mimicking what it hears; still, there is the appearance of understanding, regardless of whether it exists. Is a writer, such as Flaubert, merely a parrot, writing down human sounds and observing human life without understanding or interpretation? At the end of Braithwaite’s search for the real stuffed parrot used by Flaubert while writing his short story, the doctor discovers that dozens of stuffed parrots exist that Flaubert could have borrowed and placed on his desk. Braithwaite’s quest has thus been one of many with no resolutions, posing questions without final answers.

Staring at the Sun

Staring at the Sun, Barnes’s fourth novel published under his own name, exhibits a stronger narrative line than Flaubert’s Parrot, but as in the story of Braithwaite, narrative here is not the primary concern of the author; questions remain paramount. The central figure is a lower-middle-class woman, Jean Serjeant, significantly unlike earlier Barnesprotagonists because she is naïve and unsophisticated, lacking any intellectual pretensions. The tone of Barnes’s portrayal of Jean contrasts sharply with the wit and irony featured throughout Flaubert’s Parrot. Even Jean asks questions, however, such as what happened to the sandwiches Charles Lindbergh did not eat when he flew over the Atlantic Ocean in 1927, and why the mink is so tenacious of life (a statement from a print that hung in her bedroom when she was a child). Those questions have no answers, and Jean muses that questions that do have answers are not real questions.

The novel begins in 1941, with a prologue set during World War II. Sergeant-pilot Prosser is flying back across the English Channel to his base from France, just before dawn. The sun rises from the waves on the eastern horizon, captivating Prosser’s attention. Shortly after, he reduces his altitude when he sees smoke from a steamship far below. As he flies at the lower altitude, the sun comes up again from the sea into his view, and for the second time in a single morning he watches the sun’s ascent. He calls this event an ordinary miracle, but he never forgets it. Neither does Jean, after Prosser relates it to her a few months later while temporarily billeted in her parents’ home. Prosser soon disappears from Jean’s life but not from her memories: He kills himself, she later discovers, by flying directly into the sun. She marries Michael, a policeman who has no time for or interest in questions.

After twenty years of marriage, at the age of forty, Jean becomes pregnant for the first time. She leaves Michael in order to discover what she calls a more difficult, first-rate life; she is more on a quest for self than seeking an escape from her unsatisfactory husband. When her son, Gregory, is old enough to be left alone, Jean begins to travel widely, often by airplane. She pursues her own Seven Wonders of the World. While visiting the Grand Canyon, she observes an airplane flying below the canyon’s rim. At first it seems to her to be against nature, but she concludes instead that it is against reason: Nature provides the miracles, such as the Grand Canyon and the double rising of the sun. As the novel proceeds, Jean becomes more like Barnes’s other figures and less like her naïve and unsophisticated young self.

Gregory also parallels Barnes’s earlier intellectual characters and their questions that can yield no conclusive answers. Afraid of death but contemplating suicide, he meditates on the existence of God. He posits fourteen possible answers, but no final truth. The last part of the novel is set in the future, a world of intrusive and obtrusive computers. All the world’s knowledge has been incorporated into the General Purposes Computer (GPC), open to everyone. The computer, however, cannot answer why minks are so tenacious of life. A special informational program, TAT (The Absolute Truth), is added to the GPC, but when Gregory asks TAT whether it believes in God, the computer answers that his question is not a real question, and when he asks why it is not a real question, TAT again responds that Gregory’s second question is also not a real question. Only “real” questions, it appears, can be answered by computers. In what she believes will be the last incident in her long life, in 2021, Jean, at the age of ninety-nine, accompanied by Gregory, makes a final flight, observing the sun this time as it sets in the west rather than as it rises in the east, as it had done twice during Prosser’s “ordinary miracle” so many years before.

A History of the World in 10¡ Chapters

In A History of the World in 10¡ Chapters, Barnes continued his experimentation in form and style. Unlike his earlier novels, this one has no central character. Instead, the reader is presented with a number of chapters or stories, ostensibly historical, that are loosely connected by several common themes. The first tale or fable is a revisionist account of the story of Noah’s Ark. Narrated by a woodworm, the story portrays Noah as a drunk, humanity as badly flawed, and God and his plan as leaving much to be desired. Human beings fare equally poorly in the other chapters, and the Ark returns in later stories: A nineteenth century Englishwoman searches for the Ark on Mount Ararat; a twentieth century American astronaut, also seeking the Ark, finds a skeleton that he identifies as Noah’s but that is really the bones of the woman explorer; another chapter discusses the Ark in the form of the raft of the Medusa, painted by Théodore Géricault.

In this novel Barnes raises the question of how one turns disaster into art, or how one turns life into art. In a half chapter, or “Parenthesis,” he discusses history and love:

Barnes connects love to truth, but truth, objective truth, can never be found. Still, Sisyphus-like, one must constantly toil to find it. So it is with love: “We must believe in it, or we’re lost.” A History of the World in 10¡ Chapters does not always succeed: The stories do not always relate to one another successfully, and the tone at times fails to achieve the ironic brilliance of Flaubert’s Parrot.

Talking It Over

Talking It Over is superficially a less ambitious novel than A History of the World in 10¡ Chapters. The novel features three characters: Stuart, a decent, dull banker; his wife, Gillian; and Stuart’s old friend, Oliver, a flashy, cultured language instructor who falls in love with Gillian, who eventually leaves Stuart for Oliver. The characters are perhaps predictable, as is the eventual outcome, but Barnes’s technique reveals the same events narrated by all three characters, who speak directly in monologues to the reader. Considered something of a minor work by critics, the novel again shows considerable verbal felicity, and in spite of the seeming predictability of the plot and the ordinariness of the characters, by the end the reader comes to appreciate their quirks and foibles.

England, England

After the publication of Talking It Over, it was several years before Barnes’s next full-length novel appeared, in 1998: England, England. In the interim he had written a novella, The Porcupine, set in an Eastern European country in the aftermath of the fall of Communism. In it Barnes notes how difficult it is to escape from the past, from history, and from its illusions and delusions, and he asks what one will escape to—to what new illusions and imaginings. England, England is also a meditation on history. A serious novel with a comedic and satirical core, it features Sir Jack Pitman, a larger-than-life, egocentric businessman who builds a historical Disneyland-style theme park on the Isle of Wight, off England’s southern coast. Here tourists can enjoy and experience all of England’s past and present in the same place, from the real king and queen, who have moved from the real England to “England, England,” to a new Buckingham Palace, a half-sized Big Ben, cricket matches, the cottage of William Shakespeare’s wife Anne Hathaway, Stonehenge, poet William Wordsworth’s daffodils, and every other event or place that in popular belief represents the English past. In time, this new England—“England, England”—becomes more successful, economically and in all other ways, than the country that inspired it.

Parallel to Pitman’s story is that of Martha Cochrane, a leading member of his staff who briefly replaces him after discovering Pitman’s unusual sexual proclivities. She, too, has had a difficult relationship with history, realizing that even personal reminiscences, like broader history, lack objective reality, and that even historical memories are in reality imaginative constructs. The past becomes what we want it to be, or what we fear it was. Eventually, in old age, Cochrane escapes the present, returning to the former England, which itself has retreated into a largely preindustrial, rural past and is now called Anglia. The question becomes, Can history go backward? Is Cochrane’s Anglia any more authentic than Pitman’s theme park? Was old England itself ever more “real” than Pitman’s “England, England,” or was it, too, just an assembly of illusions and delusions?

Love, etc.

Love, etc. returns to the characters who inhabit Talking It Over after a ten-year interval. Gillian and Oliver have returned to England from France, where Gillian has become the family’s breadwinner; Oliver is as irreverent as ever but a failure in achieving his ambitions, including that of screenwriter. They have had two children. Stuart had moved to the United States, married again, again unsuccessfully, and established several businesses, more successfully; he has returned to London, where he inserts himself in the lives of Gillian and Oliver, without, however, knowing precisely what motivates him or with what ultimate aim.

As in Talking It Over, the story is told in the first person by the various characters, who include, in addition to the principals, Gillian’s mother, Stuart’s American ex-wife, and a young female assistant at Gillian’s art business. As in director Akira Kurosawa’s film Rashomon (1950), each character’s perception of reality differs from that of the others, notably at the conclusion, when Stuart and Gillian have sex after Stuart has retreated to bed. Afterward, Stuart believes the sex was consensual, but to Gillian it was rape. As the novel ends, however, for Gillian the supposed rape has turned into something else, including the possibility that the world will turn again and it will be Oliver who will be on the outside looking in.

Arthur and George

In Arthur and George, Barnes turns to an actual historical event as inspiration. Arthur is Arthur Conan Doyle, the creator of the famous literary character Sherlock Holmes, and George is George Edalji. George’s father is a Church of England vicar, a Parsee from India, and his mother is Scottish. As Doyle rose in the world, and as his literary fame led to social and economic success, Edalji pursued his own more limited goal, that of becoming a solicitor, the lowest plank in England’s hierarchical legal structure. Although Edalji saw himself as the quintessential Englishman, his mixed family background made him an anomaly in his small rural village. A loner, focused on his professional ambition, he did not make friends readily. A series of savage attacks on animals saw Edalji arrested, tried, convicted, and sentenced to seven years in prison for the crimes. There was a considerable public outcry about the trial and subsequent sentence, and after three years Edalji was freed from prison but not exonerated, and his conviction was allowed to stand.

In the eyes of many readers of his Sherlock Holmes stories, Doyle himself was Holmes’s alter ego and a brilliant detective in his own right, and he received numerous pleas for assistance in solving readers’ personal dilemmas. Most of these he ignored, preferring travel, playing golf and cricket, tending his terminally ill wife, balancing a long-term romantic relationship, and becoming increasingly fascinated by spiritualism and the occult. However, during a time when Doyle’s life was in disarray after his first wife died, he received a letter from Edalji, asking for his assistance. Edalji hoped for Doyle’s help in gaining a pardon that would allow him to take up his profession again. Doyle responded, convinced that Edalji was an innocent victim of racial bigotry, something that Edalji denied. In Arthur and George, Doyle is taken over by the persona of the fictional Holmes and pursues the truth in order to establish Edalji’s innocence and to gain compensation for the three years in prison that the young solicitor had endured.

Real life, however, even in a novel, is not like fiction, and the best that Doyle’s campaign was able to accomplish was an admission by the government that Edalji’s trial was unjust; the government refused to pay compensation because it claimed that Edalji’s attitude contributed to his conviction. This Doyle saw as sheer hypocrisy, but of course that is often the response of government officials when caught out of bounds. For Edalji, it was a partial victory, and he was able to resume his profession as a solicitor. He was also a privileged guest at Doyle’s wedding reception, and although apparently Edalji and Doyle never met again, Edalji much later attended a spiritualist memorial service for Doyle at London’s Royal Albert Hall.

Barnes has stated that the novel’s quotations of all letters save one, of all court proceedings, and of newspaper and magazine reports are reproduced from actual historical records, although of course the dialogue and thoughts of the characters are fiction. Arthur and George follows the technique employed in Love, etc. in having the story related alternately from Doyle’s and then from Edalji’s perspective, although in the third person rather than in the first person of the earlier novel. Also, when Doyle becomes the detective in pursuit of Edalji’s innocence, Barnes’s literary style and technique brilliantly mimics Doyle’s own in his Sherlock Holmes stories. Finally, authors create fictional worlds in their novels, but they are also products of their own real world. Racial divisions such as those in early twentieth century England, as portrayed in Arthur and George, continue to be of commanding importance in England, particularly since the events of September 11, 2001.