In this comic novel, Julian Barnes satirizes a publicity campaign to increase tourism in England by reinventing the nation as a commercial brand of entertainment. The novel begins and ends in England—that is to say, in “Old England,” the island nation located slightly northwest of Europe proper—but the middle portion unfolds in “England England,” an amusement park constructed on the Isle of Wight that combines the leisure strategies of Disneyland and colonial Williamsburg. The park’s creator, Sir Jack Pitman, hijacks the middle part of the novel just as he plunders his homeland of its monuments in order to capitalize on them and to aggrandize himself.
The novel features a third-person narrator telling the story of Martha Cochrane. In childhood, her favorite pastime is a puzzle of the counties of England, although much of her enjoyment comes from the teasing play with her father as he appropriates various pieces of her puzzle only to make them magically appear somewhere else. When her parents divorce, the puzzle is spoiled—one of the counties is lost. Martha grows up to become an independent and forthright young woman capable of handling everything in life except lengthy romantic commitments. When she applies for a position with Pitco, Sir Jack’s commercial enterprise, he is looking for the opposite of a “yesman,” and Martha’s cool composure gets her the job.
Sir Jack is already undertaking the project that is intended to be the crowning achievement of his business career: a theme park that will consolidate all of England’s quintessential features in one convenient location and package the resulting hodgepodge for mass consumption. Along the way, he also intends to enthrone and enshrine himself: unqualified by birth to rule England, he extracts England’s essence to the Isle of Wight—which he purchases—and leads the island’s politicians to secede from the mainland and enter the European Union as a sovereign nation.
Sir Jack’s blatant self-aggrandizement receives a blow when Martha acquires knowledge of his highly peculiar sexual predilections, which Barnes describes in a hilariously deadpan tone. In a brilliant coup, Martha seizes control of the company, leaving Sir Jack all the ceremonial trappings of his “ruling” position—his coach, his self-awarded medals, and his tricorn hat—and returning the park to a sound footing. She is an effective and devoted administrator, competently managing the tendency of the park’s actors to become in reality the historical figures they are supposed merely to impersonate (the episode with “Samuel Johnson” is particularly amusing). But she is unprepared for the depths of Sir Jack’s duplicity, and after establishing the park as a phenomenal success, she in turn is forced out of power.
The novel’s end relates Martha’s return to the land that had been England before Sir Jack turned it into world-class amusement. The decline of the British Empire is so complete that even England, after the founding of “England England,” disintegrates into the tiny ancient kingdoms of the Anglo-Saxon period. Martha immigrates to “Anglia” and takes up a modest life of retirement in a quaint village. In a long elegiac denouement, Barnes presents an Edenic picture of English preindustrial village life. Following Sir Jack’s crystallization and commercialization of the English stereotype on the Isle of Wight, the rest of the nation is free to follow its own course of de-development. Ironically, the kingdoms that had once been England become even more English, while the theme park intended to capture that quintessence remains patently artificial, although nonetheless popular for its artifice.
Julian Barnes explores the interconnections between reality and artificiality, between being and seeming, between authenticity and simulacra. In the end, he produces a droll, ironic, and deeply nostalgic but highly unsentimental love letter to England—not to England England.
Bibliography
Carey, John. “Land of Make-Believe,” The Sunday London Times, 23 August 1998, 1.
Moseley, Merritt. Understanding Julian Barnes. Understanding Contemporary British Literature. Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 1997.