Product Description

A stowaway aboard Noah’s Ark gives us his account of the Voyage – a surprising, subversive one, quite unlike the official version – which explains a lot about how the human race has subsequently developed. A guest lecturer on a cruise ship in the Aegean has his work interrupted by a group of mysterious visitors who place him in a cruel dilemma. An ecclesiastical court in medieval France hears a bizarre case . . . Barnes creates a kaleidoscope of narrative voices – from fiction and fact, painting and snatches of autobiography – that comes slowly and compellingly into focus.

‘You will want to read it again and again, and why not? There’s nothing around to touch it.’ Anne Smith, Literary Review

‘There is more moral and intellectual fodder, and more jokes, here than you will read in a month of Sundays . . . storytelling and teaching which captivate, liberate, and above all, enchant’ Financial Times

‘Funny, ironic, erudite, surprising, and not afraid to take a dive overboard into the depths of sorrow and loss. My novel of the year’ Nadine Gordimer

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #27745 in Books
• Published on: 2005-03-18
• Original language: English
• Binding: Paperback
• 384 pages

Salman Rushdie, Observer
‘Frequently brilliant, funny, thoughtful, iconoclastic, and a delight to read’

Anne Smith, Literary Review
‘You will want to read it again and again, and why not? – there’s nothing around to touch it’

About the Author

Julian Barnes has published eight other novels, Metroland, Before She Met Me, Flaubert's Parrot, Staring at the Sun, Talking It Over, The Porcupine, England, England and Love, etc; two books of short stories, Cross Channel and The Lemon Table; and also two collections of essays, Letters from London and Something to Declare. His work has been translated into more than thirty languages. In France he is the only writer to have won both the Prix Midicis (for Flaubert's Parrot) and the Prix Fimina (for Talking It Over). In 1993 he was awarded the Shakespeare Prize by the FVS Foundation of Hamburg. He lives in London.

Customer Reviews

Original perspective on "history"
What a great read! Original and quirky without the irritation of pretension. This novel manages to make you think about history and how it is presented apparently without effort (though I'm not at all sure it is without intention)yet avoids becoming too heavy or bogged down simply by changing the subject every chapter. Starting with story of Noah as never before seen and working his forward gives the author ample scope for choice which he deftly uses to gives us tales of a biblical, historical and personal nature apparently as the whim took him, their only connecting feature being repeated references to the ark, and curiously, to woodworm.
This said, I feel the author is trying to make us think about the way history is told, percieved and perhaps created.
If you fancy somehting engaging and different, you could do a lot worse than this book.

No half measures
Julian Barnes is a former lexicographer and journalist whose novels have earned that most elusive cachet - critical acclaim from both the English and French side of the Channel. His 1984 work, "Flaubert's Parrot", is part travelogue, part literary criticism: its narrator, Geoffrey Braithwaite, journeys through France and his own autobiographical detail, painting a novel in a pastiche of narrative forms.

Barnes felt he had found a substantial vehicle in Braithwaite and considered having him write a guide to the bible - an acerbic, agnostic travelogue through its pages. Instead, he developed "A History of the World in 10½ Chapters", beginning with the conceit of seeing history as re-beginning with Noah's Ark.

Barnes' first chapter presents the unexpurgated story of the Ark. How could one small ship have carried the Earth's vast variety of animal life? He has Noah as admiral of a flotilla of ships. The bible, here, is propaganda, fudging the truth in favour of a good story. He creates a paradigm for historical enquiry: all history is partial, is told from a particular perspective; all history involves editing out what the historian sees as chaff; if the bible doesn't give you the whole story, who can you believe. History, then, is a perspective, never a fundamentalist truth.

History, of course, is written by the victors, is written from the perspective of those with the power to claim that their vision of the truth is the only coherent, logical one. While the image of all formal world histories is that the author has encapsulated the truth of human life, Barnes presents history as a personal interpretation. His history of the Ark is written from the perspective of the powerless. It is the voice of the dispossessed, made no less emphatic by its fictional form.

Barnes goes on to emphasise that while historians present their material as a logical continuity, history is, in fact, a series of discontinuities and conflicting perspectives. He leaps straight into a second maritime chapter, its narrator being a guide on a cruise liner, taking tourists on history tours around the Mediterranean. History, here, belongs to those who have the time, money and curiosity to buy it in packaged form. The vessel is hijacked by terrorists, and the tour guide is left to explain his own role in this little footnote to history.

Surely law can establish truth? Barnes now explores a medieval court case, reducing the pursuit of truth to so much sophistry, to be bought and sold according to political will and power. He reintroduces the Ark's stowaways - can they claim a god-given purpose if their only purpose seems to be the destruction of man's creations?

A young woman recognises that all life is interconnected, that there is a world ecology which links the lies about Santa Claus to the lies about nuclear power. She seeks escape to sea and pursuit of an island paradise ... only to be haunted by the false fantasies of her dreams and her delusions that she can find safety.

Barnes returns again and again to various cultural distinctions between the 'clean' and the 'unclean', who shall live, who shall die, who shall have power, who shall be consumed?

He exhumes the story behind a famous French painting of a Napoleonic shipwreck, posing the question of how you turn disaster into art, and thence into triumph. Art, too, presents a snapshot of history, capturing a moment. But Barnes demonstrates that art, like history, can be critiqued, can be deconstructed, can be shown to be only an opinion, an illusion rather than a certainty.

History, then, is an anachronistic concept. It is a claim to know god's hand. But if even the bible, the supposed word of god, is partial and partisan, who can claim to know the hand of god?

A Victorian lady ascends Mount Ararat in search of the remains of the Ark. A survivor of the Titanic is tormented by a sceptical youth. Human remains are found on Ararat. Could this be Noah?

Barnes spins together, if not a series of short stories then a melange of essays. He treats history as an assemblage of information and constructs a novel as a juxtaposition of ideas. Its an incisive and disorienting experience. As a reader, you search for themes and continuity. The narrative is accessible to the reader only in the way that history is accessible to the archaeologist. You have to dig for it then make sense of it.

This is a superbly funny, provocative work. Despite its intellectual sophistication, it is remarkably accessible. It is a good read, itself an ironic commentary on the pretensions, cerebral flatulence, and impenetrability of so much history, or, indeed, art or literary criticism.

He concludes with a 'half' chapter, a conclusion in which he sets aside his own thoughts in parenthesis, delivering a personal vision of heaven as a statement that if history is presented as an attempt to understand the past, should we not be attempting to understand the future? Should we not be trying to decide where we are going, how we want humanity to evolve? It's a plea to put politics and overt values back at the heart of history rather than to pretend that it represents some sort of neutral stance, some sort of expansive balance.

And he's leaving you, as reader, to add your own parenthetical addendum to the novel, to piece together your own values and perceptions and those excerpts from your own personal history which have shaped who you think you are. Exciting. Stimulating. Highly entertaining.

A really interesting take on history
We all take history to be factual; well, I did anyway! Then I grew up a bit, and realised that there are two sides to every story. Julian Barnes cleverly presents a third viewpoint - one that might have happened, set in a brilliantly quirky and yet astonishingly believable perspective. I was so taken with the chapter on the Wreck of the Medusa, I went to visit the actual painting in the Louve, Paris, and marvelled at how Barnes had come up with his version of events. Well worth a read. In fact, read it two or three times!