England England is a story about the creation of an England theme park on the ‘empty’ Isle of Wight. Terra nullius anyone? This park is a curated conglomeration of culture and history put back together over time, whether it be Robin Hood to the planes of D-Day, all flattened.

FROM HER OFFICE Martha could experience the whole Island. She could watch the feeding of the One Hundred and One Dalmatians, check throughput at Haworth Parsonage, eavesdrop on snug-bar camaraderie between straw-chewing yokel and Pacific Rim sophisticate. She could track the Battle of Britain, the Last Night of the Proms, the Trial of Oscar Wilde, and the Execution of Charles I. On one screen King Harold would glance fatally towards the sky; on another posh ladies in Sissinghurst hats pricked out seedlings and counted the varieties of butterfly perching on the buddleia; on a third hackers were pock-marking the fairway of the Alfred, Lord Tennyson Golf Course. There were sights on the Island Martha knew so intimately from a hundred camera angles that she could no longer remember whether or not she had ever seen them in reality.

Source: England, England by Julian Barnes

These aspects are stripped of their context and turned into commodities. This occurs at the same time as a demise of the real, where England is returned to the past of Anglia / Albion of towns.

This creation of a hyperreal touches on the work of Jean Baudrillard. For Baudrillard, the hyperreal is a state where the map (the simulation) precedes the territory (the reality). He suggested that we have reached a point where the “fake” is more satisfying than the “real” because it is designed to meet our expectations.

‘What is real? This is sometimes how I put the question to myself. Are you real, for instance – you and you?’ Sir Jack gestured with mock courtesy to the room’s other occupants, but did not turn his head away from his thought. ‘You are real to yourselves, of course, but that is not how these things are judged at the highest level. My answer would be No. Regrettably. And you will forgive me for my candour, but I could have you replaced with substitutes, with … simulacra, more quickly than I could sell my beloved Brancusi. Is money real? It is, in a sense, more real than you. Is God real? That is a question I prefer to postpone until the day I meet my Maker.

Source: England, England by Julian Barnes

What we are looking at is almost always a replica, if that is the locally fashionable term, of something earlier. There is no prime moment.

Source: England, England by Julian Barnes

Talking about history, Barnes (and Baudrillard) argue that we have cannibalised and commodified the past through ignorance.

It seemed to Dr Max positively unpatriotic to know so little about the origins and forging of your nation. And yet, therein lay the immediate paradox: that patriotism’s most eager bedfellow was ignorance, not knowledge.

Source: England, England by Julian Barnes

Baudrillard argued that we turn the past into a museum, a theme park or a film because we are unable to face the complexity of the present.

Today, the history that is “given back” to us (precisely because it was taken from us) has no more of a relation to a “historical real” than neofiguration in painting does to the classical figuration of the real. Neofiguration is an invocation of resemblance, but at the same time the flagrant proof of the disappearance of objects in their very representation: hyperreal. Therein objects shine in a sort of hyperresemblance (like history in contemporary cinema) that makes it so that fun damentally they no longer resemble anything, except the empty figure of resemblance, the empty form of representation.

Source: ‘History - A Retro Scenario’ in Simulacra and Simulation by Jean Baudrillard

In Barnes’ novel, the Isle of Wight is the ultimate Simulacrum: a copy with no original. What is interesting is the way that the flattened history always has a means of breaking free, with reality pushing back, becoming strange and uncanny.

The Island had been his idea and his success. The Peasants’ Revolt of Paul and Martha had proved a forgettable interlude, long written out of history. Sir Jack had also dealt swiftly with the subversive tendency of certain employees to over-identify with the characters they were engaged to represent. The new Robin Hood and his new Merrie Men had brought respectability back to outlawry. The King had been given a firm reminder about family values. Dr Johnson had been transferred to Dieppe Hospital, where both therapy and advanced psychotropic drugs had failed to alleviate his personality disorder. Deep sedation was prescribed to control his self-mutilating tendencies.

Source: England, England by Julian Barnes

I guess the only way of maintaining the simulacrum is by continually consuming the uncanny. As Sir Jack states, “You do it by doing it”.

“Jacky, you ask of me how you do it. My answer is this: You do it by doing it"

Source: England, England by Julian Barnes

In Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari’s terms, each new narrative tweak is a re‑territorialisation that keeps the system from collapsing.

I initially read the demise of England as a commentary on Brexit, especially the turn to Anglia / Albion.

New political leaders proclaimed a new self-sufficiency. They extracted the country from the European Union, negotiating with such obstinate irrationality that they were eventually paid to depart; declared a trade barrier against the rest of the world; forbade foreign ownership of either land or chattels within the territory; and disbanded the military. Emigration was permitted, immigration only in rare circumstances. Diehard jingoists claimed that these measures were designed to reduce a great trading nation to nut-eating isolationism, but modernizing patriots felt that it was the last realistic option for a nation fatigued by its own history. Old England banned all tourism except for groups numbering two or less, and introduced a Byzantine visa system. The old administrative division into counties was terminated, and new provinces were created, based upon the kingdoms of the Anglo-Saxon heptarchy. Finally, the country declared its separateness from the rest of the globe and from the Third Millennium by changing its name to Anglia.The world began to forget that ‘England’ had ever meant anything except England, England, a false memory which the Island worked to reinforce; while those who remained in Anglia began to forget about the world beyond.

Source: England, England by Julian Barnes

However, its 1998 publication date and further reading revealed it was actually a reaction to ‘Cool Britannia’. Barnes was writing at the height of the ‘New Labour’ push to rebrand Britain as a creative powerhouse (the 1997 Demos report), while the actual economy was pivoting toward what Robert Hewison called the ‘Heritage Industry’. The novel mocks this split-brain identity: trying to be a modern brand while selling a sanitised, ‘stone-cottage’ version of history to the world. Barnes saw the irony: by trying to “sell” a nation’s soul, you eventually lose the actual country. I guess it feels like a Brexit book because it captures something of this crisis too?

Stylistically, the tone reminded me in part of Zadie Smith’s White Teeth, the everyday nature of Martha Cochrane and her ability as a omniscient narrator to dip in and out. I was also left thinking about Salman Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children with the way it reimagines the past. However, where Barnes differs is that he is always detached. He does not celebrate the mess (like Smith) or the myth (like Rushdie), rather he can be understood as pulling back the curtain and shining a light on the emptiness behind the myth. I think it is this approach that leaves the novel lingering afterwards.

What I enjoyed the most is the fine line Barnes follows in sitting within the in-between. He never quite falls into polemics. Although you feel he has an opinion, it is always left off the page as far as possible. Instead, he allows the absurdity of his characters speak. (Interestingly, this reminds me of TISM who seemingly critique everyone in equal parts, nothing ever seems sacred.) In England, England, it feels like nothing is spared. Not the high-brow intellectuals, not the greedy corporations, and not the nostalgic peasants of Anglia / Albion. No group is granted moral purity. I guess, by refusing to take a side, Barnes (and TISM) forces the reader to acknowledge that everyone is part of the performance.

‘Oh dear,’ said Mr Mullin. ‘You see, I thought you were one of us.’

‘Perhaps I’ve known too many us-es in my lifetime,’ said Martha

Source: England, England by Julian Barnes

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