A Magic Kingdom

...We prefer the replica," this cartoon Derrida says, calling for the destruction of the original so it won't compete with the more comfortable fake...

...The slapstick includes nuggets of nice writing, especially when Martha and her milquetoast lover (another Pitman technocrat) struggle to make sense of their genuine romance amid all the sham...

...To her, reality is unknowable...

...Those are the tasks Julian Barnes sets himself in his new novel, and he attacks them with his usual grace and wit...

...But Pitman is above that, too...

...Meanwhile the country itself, renamed "Anglia," has reverted to a backwater where people write with fountain pens, bobbies patrol on bikes, and transportation takes the form of steam train and dogcart...

...But as a tool for survival— not to mention for writing—the ability to at least subconsciously choose what we forget has one advantage...

...We tend to forget that memory, and history, are much less a process of recall than one of selectively destroying whole armies of recollections or potential recollections...

...And even though the theme of disappearing fathers and traumatized daughters is staple fare for the creative writing program set, Barnes does it so well that the reader distinguishes new colors in the old postcard...

...Martha, in choosing an expurgated history of herself and her country, has managed to destroy the harshest pathway back to pain in her own life...

...Barnes is too good a writer not to include a nod to some "truth...

...Indeed, the smells Martha experiences are highlighted by their careful placement throughout the novel...

...and the one thing she cannot forgive is that he has completely forgotten about the game...

...Despite Anglia's appearing to be a pleasant, tranquil place—the perfect setting for a PBS Mystery...

...Yet one memory, she reckons, is probably accurate—that of her dad pretending one piece is lost and then "finding" the missing piece in his pocket (it is always one of those tricky little Midland shires, like Nottingham, or Leicester, where Barnes himself was bom...

...The village bobby is a former corporate security man without official status...

...segment, perhaps—the author is in no way advocating it as a preferable, let alone a feasible, alternative...

...But while it takes up four-fifths of the text, this is the shallowest level of the novel...

...Thus Anglia is fully as fake as England, England—maybe more, since no one there seems as piratically aware of the con as the developers of Pitman's virtual England were...

...The philosophical freight may seem heavy...

...Barnes' species of show-don't-tell comes from the empiricism of Locke, Hume and Berkeley, a tradition that also underpins good fiction...

...In fact, it is seamlessly woven into a story that is in the end heartbreaking: Martha's loss of her father, of her original story of herself and of the England that defined her, become identified with the loss of a piece of her puzzle...

...Novels are fundamentally exercises in failure, and philosophies of memory are bound to be limited by a sort of Chartin's paradox, whereby one's speculation is circumscribed by the fact that everything we use to evaluate memory is in itself remembered...

...In a world where Disney sanitizes New York's 42nd Street to make the area safe for screening faux-historical fables such as Mulan or Anastasia, it is vital to reassess why, and how, we craft the stories that tell us who we are...

...It poses the questions: What is Martha's real history, and by extension, what is anybody's history...

...Most of the tale is told in the second part, which expands in scope beyond the perils of Martha, summoning up harlequin echoes of Evelyn Waugh and Tom Wolfe, and sending up contemporary entertainment capitalism...

...Jez Harris, the farrier and repository of village folklore, is actually an exlawyer from Detroit named Oshinsky, who makes up his tales...

...This, in turn, suggests children in school lined up like peas in a pod, and a long-buried schoolyard trauma...

...England, England has, as far as the rest of the world is concerned, become the real thing...

...Instead of employing Yankee voyeurism or French theorizing, he simply shows us Martha in her own skin, Martha as she tries to figure out her very earliest recollections—conscious that we invariably embellish our early memories...

...The section's dominant figure is Sir Jack Pitman, a tycoon hunting for a magnum opus to crown his life's work...

...They prefer Jez' stories, and that's the truth...

...There is nothing so English as defining yourself in opposition to the French...

...He engages a Parisian intellectual to help conceive his project...

...In the last tenth of the book, Sir Jack's vision has triumphed...

...No doubt he is aware of research that indicates the olfactory nerve is, of all the senses' neural pathways, geographically closest to the limbic system and the quivering roots of emotional memory...

...The author of Flaubert's Parrot and A History of the World in 10 1/2 Chapters—works largely preoccupied with the relationship between historical reality and fiction—is clearly flattering the famous Proustian . madeleine this time around...

...Here Barnes' talent as a novelist both describes and represents the ur-Englishness he is writing about...

...For example, he mimics the process of memory itself by evoking smells that suggest an agricultural fair where Martha was impressed by the beans and peas competition...

...It evokes Martha's childhood, the puzzle of the English counties and the mystery of her father's disappearance...

...But wait...

...Sir Jack takes the postmodernist at his word, buys the Isle of Wight, and builds his theme park, a place more "English" than England itself...

...It's a lovely passage that brings to the fore the dangerous sentimentalism which, though hidden under the motley of class conflict and "phlegm," may be another facet of what it means to be English...

...Here the credit-flush tourist can view facsimiles of Buckingham Palace and the White Cliffs of Dover, watch Robin Hood and his Merrie Men roast "oxen" (made of vegetable paste), and gape at a squadron of Hurricanes roaring skyward from a mock-up of the famous Biggin Hill airfield—all within a couple of hours...

...Ultimately, what is reality, anyway...

...The book is a three-part life of Martha Cochrane, a woman born at the end of the 20th century in the British sticks, who becomes the hard-shelled director of a theme park called "England, England," built on the Isle of Wight...

...what touches her is the wonder people get out of made-up stories...

...By far the most interesting section is the first—roughly one-tenth of the book —which concerns Martha's growing up...

...Hers is of trying to fit together a puzzle map of the counties of England...

...Much of this action is a howl, particularly when the actors start believing a little too strongly in their roles—"Robin Hood" begins to raid the rich, and the "RAF pilots" move into their fake Nissen huts, nervously awaiting the next "scramble...

...Where do the stories we are composed of, or the stories that helped build England, come from...

...Can you reinvent innocence...

...His novel contains a scrap of evidence much like Citizen Kane's Rosebud...

...contributor, New York "Times Book Review" In a world where grim Pilgrims, colonizing Zulu and marauding Teutonic Knights have at different times been hailed as historic heroes it is important to be reminded that such histories are always relative...

...The plot itself turns on a bit of British naughtiness...

...Neither vanishing fathers, nor disloyal friends, nor the other disappointments of life can take the forgotten away from us...

...This is hardly a balanced and wellrounded lesson, just as England, England is not a balanced and well-finished book...

...Martha, too, refuses to consider it superior...

...When dad shows up out of the blue, in her early adulthood, all Martha can do is ask him for Nottinghamshire...

...she ponders...

...The real ones, it turns out, "don't go down so well...

...He wears school ties that he has no right to, and although Barnes is trying to tell us this no longer matters in Pitman's England, he also uses the same cliched device to clue us in about the tycoon's character...

...Slipping from the final pages at a time when Martha can no longer remember its significance, even the reader has trouble placing this clue...

...That is where Martha goes to retire...

...Sir Jack is an ostentatious patriot whose own history, not coincidentally, is concocted...