project are settled by surveys and market research that reveal what people around the world associate with the word “England”—surveys that also reveal the staggering ignorance of most English people (especially the ones who call themselves well informed) when it comes to their own history.

Matters of authenticity are occasionally raised as the project moves into the planning stage: Should Robin Hood have some Merrie Women in his band as well as Merrie Men? Should Nell Gwynn, who became King Charles’s mistress as an underage child, be represented as older? The project’s “Official Historian,” the effeminate, pompous Dr. Max, taking up the postmodern theme struck by the French intellectual, points out that the notion of authenticity is bogus. He indulges in a hilarious deconstruction of “what everyone knows” about Robin Hood, and also points out that one can never locate a point of origin for anything. Everything we examine, whether present or past, is in fact a copy of something else, or derived from something else. “There is no prime moment,” he says, no such thing as “the way things really were,” which is why as a historian he has no objection to the building of a “replica” of England.

This idea is the philosophical core of the novel. At the individual level, it is acted out by the second principal character, Martha Cochrane. The reader first meets her as an adult looking back on her childhood, trying to locate her very first memory. She is unable to find a “pure” memory, something that unambiguously happened the way she recalls it. To use a modern term, all memory is “spin”—something consciously or unconsciously shaped by the mind for its own purposes. As Martha reflects:

If a memory wasn’t a thing but a memory of a memory of a memory, mirrors set in parallel, then what the brain told you now about what it claimed had happened then would be coloured by what had happened in between. It was like a country remembering its history: the past was never just the past, it was what made the present able to live with itself.

Martha grew up with a streak of irreverence in her that hardened into cynicism. The reader next meets her when at the age of thirty- nine she is interviewing for a position as “Appointed Cynic” in Sir Jack’s project: Sir Jack likes to have someone around—or thinks he does—who will challenge his views.

She gets the job, and eventually becomes romantically involved with Paul Harrison, another employee on the project, a shy, self- effacing man in his late thirties who acts as “Ideas Catcher” for Sir Jack, dutifully making note of all the great man’s pithy remarks and future plans. For a while, Paul and Martha do quite well. Paul, whose previous experiences with women have been less than fulfilling, finds that Martha makes his life seem “real” for the first time. He thinks she is “real” too, a word that in the context of the novel is loaded with an irony of which Paul is unaware.

The joint fortunes of Martha and Paul rise for a while. They stumble on some damaging information about Sir Jack that they use to blackmail him. As a result, Martha becomes chief executive officer of England, England, with Paul as her chief assistant. Sir Jack’s fatal weakness is his habit of paying monthly visits to Auntie May, the proprietor of a bizarre establishment in the London suburbs where men go to experience sexual gratification by regressing into babyhood and being pampered and looked after by attractive young women. The details of Sir Jack’s little fetish, which Barnes does not spare the reader, are at once amusing and disgusting—and also thematically relevant. After all, despite Sir Jack’s professional scorn for the idea of a pure “original” and his endorsement of the replica, he is regularly compelled to unravel his own being and reach a point of primal innocence or origin, a time long before Sir Jack became “Sir Jack,” in which he finds a release, an authenticity of being, that is apparently not available to him in any other way.

Martha’s search for authenticity seems for the most part hopeless. Every response she has is a conditioned one, the product of a damaged past. How is she to escape it? There is one moment that reveals at once how tantalizingly close and how far away this state or condition of authenticity is. When she is chief executive, a security man comes to her office and informs her that there is a problem with the smugglers. (These are employees of England, England who act as smugglers for the amusement of fee-paying tourists.) The problem is that the smugglers are, well, smuggling. Martha finds this very funny, but she does not allow her laugh to surface: “Martha suppressed, with great difficulty, the carefree, innocent, pure, true laugh that lay within her, something as incorporeal as the breeze, a freak moment of nature, a freshness long forgotten; something so untainted as to induce hysteria.”

This is the closest she will come to a pure moment of joy, unmediated by the past, even though that pristine state presumably always lies somewhere within her, inaccessible.

Martha and Paul’s romance soon falters, and Sir Jack, whom they had decked out with ceremonial titles and turned into a figurehead, turns the tables on them by buying off the private investigator who assembled (and now destroys) the evidence of Sir Jack’s indulgences at Auntie May’s. Martha is fired, and Paul betrays her by accepting Sir Jack’s offer to replace her as chief executive.

As she leaves the island that has now been renamed England, England, Martha, whose questing mind never rests, has another moment of realization. She has been pondering the question of whether life, “despite everything, has a capacity for seriousness.” Suddenly, unbidden, an image comes into her mind that harks back to a story Dr. Max told, and which in an absurdly commercialized form had been incorporated in the long, childish pageant that was England, England. The story was of a woman in the nineteenth century who was walking along a cliff-top path on her way to market, when the wind swept her off the cliff. She was saved because her strongly constructed umbrella acted as a parachute, as did her billowing underclothes.

As the image comes into her mind, Martha reflects:

A woman swept and hanging, a woman half out of this world, terrified and awestruck, yet in the end safely delivered. A sense of falling, falling, falling, which we have every day of our lives, and then an awareness that the fall was being made gentler, was being arrested, by an unseen current whose existence no-one suspected. A short, eternal moment that was absurd, improbable, unbelievable, true.

Martha concludes that even though such moments may be copied, falsified, or coarsened, it is in celebrating such a moment, getting back to it, feeling it fully, even if it never “really” happened, that the seriousness of life consists. She learns how to accept a myth—possibly a lie—and use it to come upon a truth.

That might have been a fine moment on which to end the novel, but Barnes has more. As a coda, he takes us forward twenty or thirty years, to the mainland of England, rechristened Anglia, where Martha, now an old woman, lives a quiet life in an unpretentious village. The reader learns that England recently went through a period of rapid decline. The economy collapsed, and Scotland and Wales became independent and annexed whole swaths of land that formerly belonged to their larger neighbor. The population declined. Yet the quality of life in Anglia seems to have improved. In a postindustrial economy, life has become simpler, more natural. Martha’s life has become simpler, too, and she finds she has attained a kind of stillness. Skeptical and questioning to the last, however, she does not know whether this is a result of maturity or weakness.

Sources for Further Study

Booklist 95 (March 1, 1999): 1102.

The Economist 348 (October 10, 1998): 89.

Library Journal 124 (April 15, 1999): 142.

National Review 51 (August 30, 1999): 48.

New Statesman 127 (September 11, 1998): 44.

Publishers Weekly 246 (April 12, 1999): 54.

Time 153 (June 14, 1999): 238.

The Times Literary Supplement, August 28, 1998, p. 22.