Step Right Up

This land of such dear souls, this dear dear land,

Dear for her reputation throughout the world,

Is now leased out, I die pronouncing it,

Like to a tenement or pelting farm

-- WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE, “RICHARD II”

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On one level, Julian Barnes’ latest novel, “England, England,” can be summed up as The History of the World in One Amusement Park. Sir Jack Pitman, Beethoven fancier and media titan with the out-sized ego, girth and mysterious origin of, say, the late Robert Maxwell, decides to cap his overwhelming career with his own “Ninth Symphony.” Through a combination of bully and barter, he buys the Isle of Wight and turns it into a theme park celebrating the glorious history of England.

No longer do foreign tourists have to choose between a trip to Stonehenge and Stratford-upon-Avon. England, England has it all: a half-size Big Ben, Shakespeare’s grave and Princess Di’s, Robin Hood (and his Band of Merrie Men), the White Cliffs of Dover “and beetle-black taxis shuttling through the London fog to Cotswold villages full of thatched cottages serving Devonshire cream teas.” Best of all, everything is just minutes away. No detail is too small for Sir Jack’s Executive Committee. Roast beef, Yorkshire pudding, Lancashire hotpot, Chelsea buns and Cumberland sausages all pass the nomenclatural requirements of the Gastronomic Sub-Committee, while faggots and fairy cakes, spotted dick and toad-in-the-hole are out. “Welsh rarebit, Scotch eggs, and Irish stew were not even discussed.”

And yet, this is not just some papier-ma^che England Experience, designed by entertainment ogres and demented dwarfs. With only a wee bit of cajoling, Sir Jack brings the royal residents of “Buck House” out of London and down to England, England, where the King and his Queen Denise happily perform their state functions under contract--even if the King nearly draws harassment charges for unwanted sexual advances on Nell Gwynn.

This is “England, England,” the satire. And as satire goes, it’s close enough to the horrible truth to masquerade as realism. The selling of birthright has been popular ever since Esau came home with an empty stomach, and England (the singular) is, after all, a country that has been hungry since its empire stopped bringing home the bacon. For the price of a dinner for two, for example, one can easily purchase the title Lord of the Manor. And many an echt Lord and Lady, whose grandams have their names etched in the Domesday Book, have invited tourists into their parlor in exchange for Saturday night boogie money.

But “England, England” is no mere comedy, as riotous as it is. Sir Jack Pitman may be the English equivalent of Charlie Croker in Tom Wolfe ‘s American satire, “A Man in Full.” Yet Barnes has always been a philosopher as well as a storyteller, a Socratic more than a sociologist. It’s not in his style to prick the social and political balloons of his country. Rather, he is more interested in gentler, deeper probing, asking, as his precursors Descartes and the Drifters do, both the metaphysician and the lover’s question: “How am I to know what’s really real?” What is England? What is English history?

One of the sets of brains behind England, England is concerned not only with the bottom line but with a deeper issue--whether there is anything authentic about the history they are selling or whether the entire project is bogus. “Vulgar, yes, certainly,” the Project Historian answers, “in that it is based on a coarsening simplification of pretty well everything. . . . Bo-gus implies, to my mind, an authenticity which is being betrayed. . . . Is not the very notion of the authentic somehow, in its own way, bogus?”

The questioner is a plain English Jane by the name of Martha Cochrane. At the age of 39, she has found herself a job as Special Consultant to Sir Jack or, as the tycoon himself calls the position, Appointed Cynic. “The world is my oyster,” he says, “but I am seeking in this instance not a pearl but that vital piece of grit.” And grit he gets.

Martha is one of Barnes’ finest creations, English to her bones, where other recent Anglian lasses (Bridget Jones comes to mind) are all skin and follicles. As cynical as the next man, Martha is an Everywoman who has been training for Sir Jack’s consultant job all her life. There was no single trauma that pushed Martha onto the road of cynicism, no melting ball of wax that led Martha to her own “I doubt, therefore I am.” Her earliest memories include a Lord’s Prayer for unbelievers (“Alfalfa, who farts in Devon, Bellowed be thy name”) and the constant scolding “that cynicism, Martha, is a very lonely virtue.” The disappearance of her father and the constant reminder by her mother that all men are either weak or wicked did nothing to foster her belief in God or man.

Nevertheless, Martha manages to build both Sir Jack’s dream and a relationship that approximates love with the feckless Paul, another one of the Pitman minions. She also engineers a bloodless coup (through the discovery of a hilarious set of Sir Jack’s tabloidal peccadilloes) that takes her right to the top of England, England. For a time, like the Iron Lady of Old England, she rules England, England with a success that relies on contractual efficiency rather than ruthless belief.

Yet Martha comes to understand indeed how lonely a virtue is her cynicism. In a coda as stunning as any punch line Beethoven wrote, Martha returns to an Old England (a shrunken shadow of its old self, renamed “Anglia”) that “had lost its history, and therefore--because memory is identity--had lost all sense of itself.” There she finds herself in good company with the rustic philosophers at the Village Fe^te who are reinventing the hay wain--arguing the existence of Snow White and Robin Hood. “Some said,” within Martha’s earshot, “you were real only if someone had seen you; some that you were real only if you were in a book; some that you were real if enough people believed in you. Opinions were offered at length, fueled by scrumpy and ignorant certainty.”

But there are no believers like true cynics. And Martha stumbles upon her epiphany looking at the faces of the village children watching the fancy dress parade, who “had not yet reached the age of incredulity, only of wonder; so that even when they disbelieved, they believed.” If she hasn’t found authenticity in her newfound land, at least, for the first time in her life, she has achieved a certain serenity.

That’s a handy travel advisory for tourists visiting the British Isles (or anywhere else, for that matter) this summer. And it makes “England, England” not only a hilarious satire but, above all, a valuable Baedeker to the real world of rocks and soul.