But it’s hard to avoid the sense that these writers, now in their 70s, are simply no longer interested in the present day. But whatever Barnes says, they are a jolly game too – fun to swirl around the mouth after a dinner party – and perhaps also an excuse to indulge a few might-have-beens (imagine the sex we could have had were it not for those pesky Christians!). Amis inserted a made-up girlfriend, “Phoebe”, into his near-memoir Inside Story (2020), as well as the peculiar conjecture that Philip Larkin was his father.Ĭounterfactuals can serve as serious enquiry, a way of rousing us from what John Stuart Mill called “the deep slumber of decided opinion”. It could have been very different,” McEwan wrote in his last novel Machines Like Me (2019), in which Alan Turing does not die in 1954 and artificial intelligence arrives in the 1980s. “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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