So obviously, where I come from, Julian Barnes is a big deal. If you wanted confirmation, then there he is with Rushdie as one of the literati cameos in Bridget Jones's Diary. Is there a higher literary accolade? Much to my undergraduate embarrassment, I found Flaubert's Parrot so tedious I really couldn't tell you whether it's a book with intellectual merit (which is totally different to interest).
So now I'm reading A History of the World in 10 1/2 Chapters and I'm enjoying it as far as it goes. Tony Martin says he couldn't get passed the first word in The Da Vinci Code - TM: "'Renowned curator somebody somebody'... why do we have to know he's 'renowned'?" EK: "Makes it sound classy, Tone" TM: "Isn't that called 'bad writing'? Isn't that crowbarring information in too early?" EK: "Very early." - Anyway, I couldn't get passed (without comment) the first page in A History where it described the women on Noah's Ark as 'too delicate' to muck out the animals. Barnes does realise this is the Ancient Levant these people come from, right? Not Victorian England?
But more bizarrely, Barnes, in his attempt to deconstruct one of our (many) genesis myths and to do it from a non-human perspective, seems to have got hooked on committing character assassination on Noah, as though we were all deeply invested in Noah as a really top bloke in the first place. The Bible isn't especially positive about Noah, and that's nothing to what the English Miracle Play tradition does to him. Why is Barnes spending quite so much effort debunking something we really never bunked?
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
No comments:
Post a Comment