“The present is the frailest of improbable constructs. This was “the moment history went wrong”, she believes.īarnes, like his contemporaries Ian McEwan and Martin Amis, relishes these exercises in the historical subjunctive. The eponymous heroine, an enigmatic teacher of “culture and civilisation” at the University of London, is convinced that the world would have become a better and more tolerant place were Julian the Apostate, the last pagan emperor of Rome, not thwarted in his attempts to suppress Christianity. The baffling new novel by Julian Barnes is another blend of fact and fiction embellished with aphorisms about history, religion and love – only without any of the playfulness of his previous works Flaubert’s Parrot (1984) or A History of the World in 10½ Chapters (1989). There would have been no Crusades, no Joan of Arc, no Reformation – nothing to reform! – no Sistine Chapel, and no Cliff Richard, or at least not as we know him. What if what if what if what if what if… What if Christianity had never triumphed? What if it had just remained a weird cult? A footnote in the long and varied history of the Roman empire? What if we hadn’t exchanged many gods for one?
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