Having lost interest in Barnes way when England England was published, I had to read what the old bean wrote to win the man booker. The book starts in a pubescent haze that I enjoyed. After that period it took me a long time to get through the rest as i found it simply boring. A few nice aphorisms of insight do decorate the pages that actually raise the bar of its profundity if anything at all ("history is that certainty produced at the point where the imperfections of memory meet the inadequacies of documentation"). However the last few dozen pages hit me like a truck in terms of emotional content. Waves of sadness that is pleasant only when they are artistic flooded over and an age-old metaphysical bellow of humankind tried to rise up my throat. It was not the content in fact I couldn t narrate what happens even to intentionally cause a spoiler to surface. I was reminded of another phrase Barnes had put down in Flaubert's Parrot on the tragedy of man -i believe belongs to Balzac but I' m not sure- which went something like "mankind is like a clumsy bear banging on a broken kettle while actually trying to serenade the stars". Anyway, i don t know if this book is booker prize material but it nonetheless contains some niches of wisdom and sources of contemplation if nothing else that can only come from a seasoned novelist as Barnes.
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