A History of the World in 10 ½ Chapters (1989), a collection of subtly connected short historical stories in different styles, most are fictional but some are historical written by Julian Patrick Barnes, tells Earth’s story from biblical times to the 1980s.
Although the stories within the collection stand alone, they are all linked through their connection to Noah’s Ark and the woodworms that boarded the Ark as stowaways. The woodworms, who claim to know exactly what happened aboard Noah’s Ark, reappear at various points throughout the book. They serve as a metaphor for decay and how our appreciation and understanding of history worsens over time. Too often, we forget history and what it can teach us, and the truth is lost forever.
The first story, “The Stowaway,” centers on the woodworms’ journey on Noah’s Ark. They lament that God and Noah chose to abandon them, leaving them to go extinct. Now that they are on the ship, they comment on how what they see is very different from typical modern accounts of Noah’s Ark. It reminds them of a prison cell, not paradise, and they question whether Noah was the right person for the job. They wish they could hijack the ship and turn it around.
In the second story, “The Visitors,” the narrative jumps forward to 1985; this time, someone does hijack a ship. Terrorists take over a luxury cruise liner and torment everyone on board. A man dies as the event descends into an international crisis. Barnes based the story on the real-life hijacking of MS Achille Lauro in 1985.
“The Wars of Religion” returns to the woodworms, putting them back into the spotlight. This time, they are charged with vandalizing a church by eating its foundations. Because of them, the church is unstable. Here, Barnes draws a connection between forgetting history and the erosion of faith and religion.
In “The Survivor,” Barnes takes readers into an alternate universe. In this universe, Earth’s first major disaster is the Chernobyl tragedy. Hysteria spreads, and everyone thinks nuclear war is imminent. The protagonist in this story is so terrified that she runs as far away from society as she can get. She spends the rest of her life at sea; it is unclear whether nuclear war erupts.
“Shipwreck” focuses on the painting The Raft of Medusa. The narrator doesn’t like the painting very much because it sanitizes a tragic shipwreck. The picture doesn’t show the true horror of a shipwreck—instead, it glamorizes death and suffering for artistic effect.
“The Mountain” includes The Raft of Medusa as a talking point. In this story, a woman who visits a monastery in the mountains views the painting and reflects on its meaning. She then devotes her time to God and apologizing for the sins of others. Specifically, she wants God to forgive her father for whatever crimes he committed in life.
“Three Simple Stories” moves between an RMS Titanic survivor, Jewish refugees aboard the MS St Louis in 1939, and the biblical story of Jonah and the whale. These stories all consider what it is like to survive at sea when the odds seem stacked against one.
In “Upstream,” an actor heads to the jungle for filming. He doesn’t like the jungle because it is far removed from normal society, and it is unsafe. Knowing that the natives don’t like the film crew, the actor fears it is only a matter of time before they attack the camp. Although the natives don’t attack the film crew, one of the actor’s friends dies in a rafting accident during filming. The actor doesn’t know what to believe anymore.
Sandwiched between chapters eight and nine is the very short story “Parenthesis.” The narrator talks about love and how love gives us a reason to live. Without love, we don’t leave any lasting legacies behind. In this story, the narrator, calling himself “Julian Barnes,” directly addresses readers.
//'I love you.' For a start, we'd better put these words on a high shelf; in a square box behind glass which we have to break with our elbow; in the bank. We shouldn't leave them lying around the house like a tube of vitamin C. If the words come too easily to hand, we'll use them without thought; we won'tbe able to resist. Oh, we say we won't, but we will. We'll get drunk, or lonely, or likeliest of all - plain damn hopeful, and there are the words gone, used up, grubbied. We think we might be in love and we're trying out the words to see if they're appropriate? How can we know what we think till we hear what we say? Come off it; that won't wash. These are grand words; we must make sure we deserve them. Listen to them again: 'I love you'. Subject, verb, object: the unadorned, impregnable sentence. The subject is a short word, implying the self-effacement of the lover. The verb is longer but unambiguous, a demonstrative moment as the tongue flicks anxiously away from the palate to release the vowel. The object, like the subject, has no consonants, and is attained by pushing the lips forward as if for a kiss. 'I love you'. How serious, how weighted, how freighted it sounds.
I imagine a phonic conspiracy between the world's languages. They make a conference decision that the phrase must always sound like something to be earned, to be striven for, to be worthy of. "Ich liebe dich": a late-night, cigarette-voiced whisper, with that happy rhyme of subject and object. "Je t'aime": a different procedure, with the subject and object being got out of the way first, so that the long vowel of adoration can be savoured to the full. (The grammar is also one of reassurance: with the object positioned second, the beloved isn't suddenly going to turn out to be someone different.) "Ya byn lyublyu": the object once more in consoling second position, but this time - despite the hinting rhyme of subject and object - an implication of difficulty, obstacles to be overcome. "Ti amo": it sounds perhaps a bit too much like an apéritif, but is full of structural conviction with subject and verb, the doer and the deed, enclosed in the same word.
Forgive the amateur approach. I'll happily hand the project over to some philanthropic foundation devoted to expanding the sum of human knowledge. Let them commission a research team to examine the phrase in all the languages of the world, to see how it varies, to discover what its sounds denote to those who hear them, to find out if the measure of happiness changes according to the richness of the phrasing. A question from the floor: are there tribes whose lexicon lacks the words "I love you"? Or have they all died out?
We must keep these words in their box behind glass. And when we take them out we must be careful with them. Men will say 'I love you' to get women into bed with them; women will say 'I love you' to get men into marriage with them;
both will say 'I love you' to keep fear at bay, to convince themselves of the deed by the word, to assure themselves that the promised condition has arrived, to deceive themselves that it hasn't yet gone away. We must beware of such uses. "I love you" shouldn't go out into the world, become a currency, a traded share, make profits for us. It will do that if we let it. But keep this biddable phrase for whispering into a nape from which the absent hair has just been swept.//
“Project Ararat” follows an astronaut sent to uncover the remains of Noah’s Ark. This once-in-a-lifetime opportunity will have real consequences for the world.
“The Dream” considers what happens when it’s all over and we die. It muses on what Heaven looks like and what it can teach us about life, death, and historical preservation.
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By Nandakishore Sir
A History of the World in 10½ Chapters
by Julian Barnes
I can't review this book without giving an outline of the story, so there may be mild spoilers. But I don't think it will affect your enjoyment of the book.
History isn't what happened. History is just what historians tell us. There was a pattern, a plan, a movement, expansion, the march of democracy; it is a tapestry, a flow of events, a complex narrative, connected, explicable. One good story leads to another. First it was kings and archbishops with some offstage divine tinkering, then it was the march of ideas and the movements of masses, then little local events which mean something bigger, but all the time it's connections, progress, meaning, this led to this, this happened because of this. And we, the readers of history, the sufferers from history, we scan the pattern for hopeful conclusions, for the way ahead. And we cling to history as a series of salon pictures, conversation pieces whose participants we can easily reimagine back into life, when all the time it's more like a multi-media collage, with paint applied by decorator's roller rather than camel-hair brush.
The history of the world? Just voices echoing in the dark; images that burn for a few centuries and then fade, stories, old stories that sometimes seem to overlap; strange links, impertinent connections. We lie here in our hospital bed of the present (what nice clean sheets we get nowadays) with a bubble of daily news drip-fed into our arm. We think we know who we are, though we don't quite know why we're here, or how long we shall be forced to stay. And while we fret and writhe in bandaged uncertainty - are we a voluntary patient? - we fabulate. We make up a story to cover the facts we don't know or can't accept; we keep a few true facts and spin a new story round them. Our panic and our pain are only eased by soothing fabulation; we call it history.
This quote is taken from the chapter titled 'Parenthesis' in the novel - it is the 'half chapter' that the novelist is referring to in the title. It sort of encapsulates what he is trying to to do in the book.
In school, I learnt history as a bunch of dry facts: events, dates, and places which had to be memorised. It was utterly boring, and an absolute nightmare to cram it all up to regurgitate on the answer sheet during the exams. I said goodbye to it as soon as I could and embraced mathematics and science, which were more amenable to rational analysis (as I felt in my late teens, that is).
Then as I started reading, I found the problem was not with history but with how it was taught. Properly presented, history is more exciting than any work of fiction. It's the story of humanity - our story - and it is the source of all the stories out there.
The only problem is - it isn't true. What is true, are the dry facts which I used to mug up during childhood. The rest is the flesh put on the skeleton by historians: and according to their whims and fancies, they can create a beautiful damsel or a grotesque monster.
(Hey, I know it's not as bad as that. There are acceptable ways of interpreting and analysing history, and historians are on the whole an honest lot, so we do get a true picture of the past by reading the books of reputed scholars in the field - despite disagreements. But the subject, on the whole, has a whole lot of subjectivity in it.)
This book is fiction. But is it a novel? Or a set of interlinked stories? Or a potpourri of myth, history, exposition and fiction? It would be difficult to say. The ten-and-a-half chapters mentioned in the title have only tenuous links to one another, but reading them in series, the connections are obvious. But it is immediately apparent that they would existence as standalone stories too. Starting with (1) the Biblical myth of Noah's Ark (narrated by a woodworm which has stowed aboard without the knowledge of the patriarch), it moves through (2) the hijacking of a ship by Palestinian terrorists (or freedom fighters, depending on which side of the divide you are); (3) a curious case from the sixteenth century where woodworm are tried in a French court for gnawing through the bishop's chair, causing him to fall and suffer a head injury; (4) the tale of a delusional woman, going to the sea with two cats to escape a supposed nuclear holocaust; (5) the history behind Théodore Géricault's famous nineteenth century painting, The Raft of the Medusa; (6) the story of a passionate evangelist who makes a pilgrimage to Mount Ararat; (7) three short vignettes, lumped together for no apparent reason, about the Titanic, the myth of Jonah and the whale, and a ship full of Jews sailing from Germany in 1939, whose passengers no country wants to accept; (8 ) an epistolary story of an actor, filming the story of Jesuit missionaries in untamed South America; (9) the tale of an astronaut who discovers God on the moon and embarks on a mission (again!) to Mount Ararat; (10) and a fantasy about heaven as we have never imagined it. In between chapters eight and nine is tucked in the parenthesis, in which Barnes talks directly to the reader about love, life and history.
Barnes is extremely readable, and you can get lost in his beautiful prose full of wry English humour without analysing it. But at some point of time, the perceptive reader will realise that there is a subtext here, which she could come to grips with if only she'd do a bit of brainwork. There are enough metaphors for the taking. Almost all the chapters contain sea voyages, emanating directly from the journey which Noah is credited with taking. The mess in the Middle East, the trials and tribulations of evangelists, and the sad plight of Jews in Hitler's Germany - one can't help feeling that it all started with Noah; and the woodworm, insidiously infesting and gnawing at the very foundations of the Church, has been there even before the deluge. Humankind's progress is always accompanied by rot from within.
To be entirely honest, this fictitious history contains precious little of "real" history. Barnes is just trying to put his narrative - the narrative of a creative writer - into a frame work of history (as defined by him in the passage quoted in the beginning.) Whatever he has done, however, is a resounding success.
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