Julian Barnes's A History of the World in 10 1/2 Chapters isn't really a history of the world. And the half chapter is just as long as any of the others. But he calls the half chapter a "Parenthesis," and he starts with the Great Flood and ends with a view of heaven (or is it just a dream?) so I suppose the title is at least colorably justified.

A History is an uneven collection of eleven diverse vignettes, alternately witty, hilarious, disturbing, or incomprehensible. The book starts with a clever and subversive retelling of Noah's Ark, a great opener. "I don't know how best to break this to you," says the anonymous and irreverent deconstructionist telling the tale, "but Noah was not a nice man. I realize this idea is embarrassing, since you are all descended from him; still, there it is. He was a monster, a puffed-up patriarch who spent half his day grovelling to his God and the other half taking it out on us. He had a gopher-wood stave with which . . . well, some of the animals carry the stripes to this day." And have you ever wondered what Noah and his family ate on the Ark? As the narrator wryly reminds us, they weren't vegetarians. (And that's why we don't have unicorns.)

The story of the Ark is followed by a jump of several millenia, to a modern cruise ship that is boarded by terrorists. Barnes spins a slyly understated but ultimately chilling tale of an indulgent academic's fall from entertainment to complicity. Third on the list is a hilarious transcript of fifteenth century trial proceedings against woodworms whose consumption of a ceremonial chair left it so weak that it collapsed under a visiting bishop who was therefore "hurled against his will into a state of imbecility." Barnes's fictional (but historically based) renditions of the speeches on both sides are masterpieces of legal verbosity, filled with formalistic analogies, elegantly tortured sentences, and speciously logical arguments about an inherently irrational trial. Perhaps because I'm a law student, I found this chapter to be the highlight of the book.

From there, however, the stories degenerate. The worst is the chapter-long "half chapter," a self-indulgent soliloquy on love. Almost as bad are interlocking stories of two religious fanatics, separated by a century, who go to Mount Ararat in search of the mythical final resting place of Noah's Ark. At least the book ends on a relatively high note: "The Dream" is an amusing version of Heaven, disguised as the best dream in the world.

Although A History seems like a collection of short stories, Barnes has claimed that the book was conceived of and executed as a novel--and, indeed, various motifs run throughout the book, including the woodworm, Noah's Ark, and the nature of love and faith. At least from my initial reading, however, the connections were merely tenuous and incidental, though other people clearly disagree. (For instance, the linked article claims that the novel "celebrates the textuality of history, the narrativity of historical narration." Whoa, man.)

Nevertheless, Barnes writes in a charming and engaging style, hardly lyrical and yet strangely enthralling. Even in the worst chapters, his effortless prose scans easily. And some of the individual components of A History are true gems. It's too bad that the novel as a whole falters after a stellar start, and stumbles all the way to the end.

Copyright © 2003 Steven Wu