IF the word “postmodern” makes your heart go pit-a-pat, you will probably love England, England, Julian Barnes’s latest pomo effort. It’s full of all the clever things that have made Barnes such a darling of the academically inclined lit-crit crowd. In Flaubert’s Parrot (1984), he dazzled susceptible souls by combining some knowing stretches of biographical and literary-critical material about Gustave Flaubert with the story of an aging doctor’s quest to find the real stuffed parrot featured in Flaubert’s story “Un coeur simple.” Now. six or seven books later, after most of his readers have had a chance to wake up again, Barnes has produced a mildly dystopian fantasy full of profundities about the unreliability of memory and the transformation of history into kitsch. Sample from the book’s opening pages:
If memory wasn’t a thing but a memory of a memory, mirrors set in parallel, then what your brain told you now about what it claimed had happened then would be colored by what had happened in between. It was like a country remembering its history: The
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