Cross Channel

The short stories in this book are some of my favourites. Brambilla is one of the best pieces I have ever read, in my opinion. Captures the world of cycle racing.

Ten stories, each a variation on the theme of the British in France. A British general, held prisoner by Napoleon, settles into his dotage with memories of two earlier expeditions to France, one a Grand Tour of sorts as a very young man, the other a challenge cricket match that was pretermitted by the French Revolution. British contractors, with their British navvies, construct the railroad from Paris to Rouen to Le Havre. Two English spinsters acquire a dilapidated estate in Pauillac and learn the winemaking chicaneries of vinage and coupage. An aging Englishwoman, who works as a copyeditor on a dictionary project, continues her annual pilgrimage of fifty years to the grave of her brother at Cabaret Rouge, one of the cemeteries for soldiers killed in the Great War. A bicycle racer and his girlfriend, a stripper, recount stories of the Tour de France and other races, including stratagems to fool the drug-testers. And five more. The settings of the stories range from the 1660's to 2015 (the last of the stories engages in a slight temporal projection). Published in 1996, CROSS CHANNEL was Julian Barnes's first collection of short stories. And it reveals him to be a master of the form. With many books of short stories, the contents all come from the same mold. Not so CROSS CHANNEL, in which Barnes employs different styles and voices, always in an accomplished and assured fashion. What the stories have in common is grace, charm, sophistication, and their humaneness. To me, two of the stories were particularly striking. "Experiment" is about the time, in 1928, when the narrator's Uncle Freddy was enlisted by the Surrealists to participate in their sexual research. Uncle Freddy was challenged to distinguish between two young women he had sex with blindfolded. The story ends with a clever twist, an engaging analogue from the world of wine. In the last story of the book, "Tunnel", the narrator - who turns out to be Julian Barnes himself - is taking the Eurostar from London to Paris, via the Chunnel. The story consists of Barnes's musings about his fellow travellers and about aging, as well as remembrances of travels from his past. For example: "He remembered . . . no, that verb, he increasingly found, was often inexact. He seemed to remember, or he retrospectively imagined, or he reconstructed, from films and books with the aid of a nostalgia as runny as old Camembert, a time when travellers crossing Europe by train would become acquaintances for the length of the journey." CROSS CHANNEL is not usually cited as one of Barnes's best or most noted books. To my mind, it deserves to be better known. As, perhaps, does Barnes as an author. For example, why isn't he Sir Julian Barnes? Four-and-a-half stars.

The Brits abroad often bring to mind images of endomorphic, bawling, sunburned men drunkenly marauding in the south of Spain, or perhaps at an England football away match. Not, of course, in the hands of Julian Barnes, who strictly demarcates his fiction between the crass and vulgar (his pulp 'Duffy' detective novels under the pseudonym Dan Kavanagh) and his more regular literary output which often focuses on questions of France, and its relationship with Barnes's native Britain. Barnes is a phenomenally cultured Francophile (for a manifestation of this, check out his essay collection 'Something to Declare') and his prose at its best is playful, witty and detailed. Barnes, the linguist, and former lexicographer and law student has a keen eye for the curious details of life. He can spin fictional gold out of a simple engraving on a stone, or a bottle of wine, or an elegant account of Medieval Religious persecution. This he did to great effect in his 1984 novel, Flaubert's Parrot, which is one of the most elegant and playful novels ever written, and to lesser, but still successful effect, in his 1989 big canvas novel 'A History of the World in 10 1/2 Chapters'. Cross Channel takes the themes developed in these two novels - love, history, art, food, persecution, memory - and adds to them a sort of coda in the form of ten elegant, formally sophisticated stories. It should be said at the outset that Cross Channel is not as accomplished a book as the previous novels mentioned, but is still worth reading as form of the most elegant type of travel literature. All of the stories feature British (and Irish) people in France. The first, and maybe best story, Interference concerns an elderly English composer who wants his wife to hear his final compositional masterpiece on the radio but can't get decent reception unless everyone else in their isolated French village is silent. Junction is a fairly flat story telling the story of the Paris - Rouen railway, partially built by British navies. Experiment is a tongue in cheek pastiche of surrealism: a young man tries to unravel the story of his lumpen, heavy drinking uncle's participation in a sexual experiment with Andre Breton and pals. Melon is another fairly disappointing story which revolves around an aristocratic man's unawareness of the origins of his food, and a cricket match around the time of the French Revolution. Evermore is a cracker, a poignant story about an elderly woman who makes annual pilgrimages to northern France where her son was killed in the First World War. It is a quiet, reflective piece on the difficulties of maintaining memory over the years, with the ghost of Kipling lingering beneath the surface. Gnossiene is a short piece that doesn't quite come off about a man travelling to a literary conference to a destination that seems to be a hoax. Barnes here has fun, based on his own experiences being interviewed by literary critics in France, with contrasting the French and Anglo Saxon mindsets 'so Monsieur Clements, le mythe et la realite?'. Dragons takes us back a while (there is great historical sweep in these stories) to a time when ignorance, superstition and religious persecution ruled in Medieval France. Brambilla brings us back to modern themes with some riffs on the Tour de France - including the tale of the drug raddled cyclist who offered his girlfriend's urine as a sample: 'the good news is you're clean. The bad news is you're pregnant'. Hermitage is a quintessential Barnes tale of women and wine set in the late 19th Century - two English spinsters buy a vineyard in France and set about creating their own version of an idyll copied a century later by middle class Brits: 'Idling glances proposed a different life: in a timbered Normandy farmhouse, a trim Burgundy manoir, a backwater chateau of the Berry.' The final story, Tunnel, stretches the timescale into the future (sometime soon after 2009 I think we are meant to surmise judging by the vintage of wine drunk in that story). Barnes seems to be fond of setting his stories in the near future - he used the same trick in 'Staring at the Sun, published in 1985 but the time frame for the end of that novel soon approaching). Perhaps he plans to read over these stories in his old age and see how they have stood the test of time. The narrator of Tunnel is an elderly English novelist (Barnes himself perhaps?) who reflects on ageing and France on a Eurostar trip from London to Paris. Here's a passage from that story which could only come from the pen of Julian Barnes: 'He turned away form himself and began to speculate about his immediate neighbours. To his right were three fellows in suits plus a chap in a striped blazer; opposite him an elderly woman. Elderly: that's to say, about the same age as himself. He said the word again, slid it around his mouth. He'd never much cared for it - there was something slimy and ingratiating about its use - and now that he was himself what the word denoted, he liked it even less. Young, middle-aged, elderly, old, dead; this was how life was conjugated. (No, life was a noun, so this was how life declined. Yes, that was better in any case, life declined. A third sense there too: life refused, life not fully grasped. 'I see now that I have always been afraid of life,' Flaubert had once conceded. Was this true of all writers? And was it, in any case, a necessary truth: in order to be a writer, you needed in some sense to decline life?'...

Good book, efficient delivery.

Vintage Barnes. Precious writing, touching and lasting.

Barnes a une culture franco-anglaise magnifique et après avoir savouré ses textes, je recommande d'aller s'informer davantage encore sur les sujets traités, comme par exemple en ce qui concerne "dragon", fait historique qui rafraîchit nos connaissances et/ou nous fait découvrir mieux la France. Lecture à recommander aux anglophones autant qu'aux francophones!

A delightful collections of short stories guaranteed to give pleasure to any not just the francophile

I liked some stories but as a whole the book did not have a great impact on me, not really my cup of tea.

As a regular visitor to France every one of these stories “rang true”! My favourite tale was "Hermitage" about two women who buy a vineyard in The Medoc, Bordeaux, France towards the end of the 19th century. Their tribulations with phylloxera, harvesting, adulterating the wine with grapes from outside The Medoc, the intransigence of the workers are many and occasionally funny. Another favourite is "Tunnel" about a solo traveller and a modern day train journey on Eurostar from London to Paris with reminiscences of earlier such journeys through a changing French countryside. Finally worth a mention is "Experiment", a short story about how a young Englishman in 1928 gets involved with a Surrealist group in Paris and their obsession with love and sex. The experiment involves determining whether he can tell which of the two women he has sex with is French and which is English ...... when he is blindfolded! Each story typifies French culture from a range of eras or events and the absorption of a Brit into it. A writer, a cyclist, a tourist .... winemaking, Tour de France, First World War, religious intolerance .... all are here. I’m not usually a fan of short stories, but sometimes they’re handy if you’re travelling on a short flight to Europe somewhere, or 30 mins in Eurotunnel, or maybe a short train journey to Manchester or London from the Cotswolds. But also I like Julian Barnes style of writing whether it be a hilarious rant about the uselessness of cookery books or the seriously deep exploration of Flaubert’s Parrot!

I'm a Barnes fan, but as yet I haven't read this one.