Written by Julian Barnes and taking out the Man Booker Prize
in 2011, do not be deceived by this
book’s title. A History of the World in
10½ Chapters is a masterpiece; a wonderful piece of modern writing that
tackles the archaic in a traditional yet contemporary format. This book is
witty, heartfelt, will make you laugh, make you think, and make you question
not just religion, but absolutely everything! It’s bloody brilliant!
Beginning
with a stowaway’s account of their voyage on Noah’s Ark, we move through a
series of short stories that make up the 10½ chapters of the title. We see a
cruise ship hijacked and a hostage situation occur, a woman flee from nuclear
war and find an island, an actor’s accounts of his time in the Jungle of India,
two women venture to Mount Ararat to the landing place of Noah, and a rather
unusual court case: to outline just a few of the memorable stories that make up
this book.
Salman Rushdie praised this book as being “brilliant, funny, and
thoughtful” and it completely is! Humour is apparent from the very first
chapter with the stowaway’s account of Noah and the voyage on the Ark, which
admittedly takes a bit of the romanticism away from the tale, but that’s the
point. The voice that Barnes creates within the first story, only giving away
the species of this creature right at the end, is absolutely brilliant because
it’s accessible, contemporary, and really strong and opinionated. You cannot
help hear and read in the cynical voice that this creature has and what makes
the opening chapter alone so wonderful is the character’s direct inclusion of
the reader. Throughout the chapter the stowaway directly addresses the reader
and, by extension, the readership: “you” and “your species”, which both
excludes the reader from the events being described, but simultaneously
includes them within the chronicling and telling of the story.
But it’s
important to understand that each chapter is told by a different character, in
a different time, from a different perspective and whilst there is a recurring
motif of Noah and his Ark as well as the species of stowaway at the beginning
in each chapter, they are not to be read as being directly linked with one
another. Each chapter is a fresh start and the voyeuristic pleasure of reading
is really played with here through the fact that we are witnessing/reading
about a plethora of different worlds and different events. There are even some
chapters that are written more as a discussion paper or even loose essay and we
get a strong sense of the ‘implied author’ from these chapters as he refers to
himself as Julian and writes in the first person. Whilst we can never know if
the views and opinions expressed are truly that of the ‘actual’ author rather
than the ‘implied’, an immediate, intimate connection forms during these
chapters between reader and author and the chapter on love is one that is
particularly moving, touching, provoking, and as Rushdie commented,
‘thoughtful’.
As I mentioned, we’ve got this recurring theme of Noah and his
Ark as well as intertextual recurring references to the stowaway of the first
chapter and this works a lot like egg yokes in burger patties: binding the
mixture together and keeping it rich and moist and holds its shape. Barnes’
choice of using a simple rhetoric device is, in my opinion, a wonderful stroke
of brilliance because he does it SO well and it just works so wonderfully to
bind the stories together into the form of the novel, but at the same time
highlights the isolation of each story from one another. The complexity and
duality that this one little device brings to the work is masterful and so
clever because it’s done well.
Just as the Greek mythologies and the Bible are
a series of shorter stories, so too is this book and that is what I meant when
I mentioned that it was written in a ‘traditional’ form. Barnes’ contemporary
twist on the form comes in the form of his wonderfully witty and modern method
of writing, which works to further highlight a recurring theme of the archaic
and the modern that thrives within the stories.
Filled with adventure,
pilgrimage, drama, suspense, humour, paradise, academia, and seemingly
everything in between, A History of the
World in 10½ Chapters is a contemporary literary marvel that you can go
back and read again and again.
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