[ book tip by Oliver Jones ] Like many readers, I first discovered Julian Barnes through his inspired third book, Flaubert's Parrot, but have found it hard not to feel that his more recent novels have failed to live up to the sheer ingenuity and verve which this earlier book displayed. Cross Channel, a collection of ten short stories at only 200 pages in length, was the antidote to any disappointment I felt: ten narrators, ten sets of situations and places and characters, giving this most intellectual but never cerebral of writers ample opportunity to show off the breadth of his imagination and narrative flair.

The stories are linked by nothing more than the loose theme of the interaction of Britain and France. In my favourite, 'Evermore', Barnes portrays a woman who has dedicated her life to mourning her brother who was killed in the Great War, and we follow her personal story and reflections as she weaves in and out of the battlefields and cemeteries of northern France in her Morris Minor. Her insights into historical events we take for granted are conveyed with humbling eloquence. 'Interference' is an acutely rendered picture of a crabby and pompous English composer who has relocated to France to escape the country he loves to hate, only to give in to sub-Vaughan-Williams pastoral nostalgia in his final compositions. I also loved 'Dragons', a relentlessly bleak parable of the Chaigne family, who are hounded into annihilation by Irish catholic mercenaries for their Protestant beliefs. For a writer who is often thought of as postmodern and equivocal, 'Dragons' and 'Evermore' make very full bodied humanist statements.

A couple of the stories fail to fire: 'Gnossienne', a surreal anecdote of a writer making his way to a literary conference, fails to engage. Similarly Melon, which somehow concerns a group of Englishmen travelling to France to play cricket during the French Revolution, is navel-gazing, however convincingly Barnes inhabits a late eighteenth century idiom.

Quibbles aside, no-one who appreciates the medium of the short story or admires Barnes' refined style will fail to be disappointed by this varied and stimulating collection.

[ Favourite quote ] 'Was it a vice to have become such a connoisseur of grief?'

[ book info ] Barnes, Julian: Cross Channel. (original language: English) Picador, London, 1996 (1995). ISBN: 0330349163.