Pleasures of Merely Circulating Flaubert's Parrot

By Martha Duffy

Almost any literary contrivance can be called a novel nowadays, so the label will do for Flaubert's Parrot. What the book turns out to be, though, is a brash, footloose ramble through the life and works of Gustave Flaubert, and it is hard to think of a work starting from such a narrow, scholarly premise that is so free of preciousness. Julian Barnes does provide one conventional feature: a narrator, in this case Geoffrey Braithwaite, a retired English doctor and Flaubert amateur. He first visited Normandy, the novelist's native ground, as a soldier in 1944, and after 40 years returns to--well, that is not so clear.

Flaubert "died little more than a hundred years ago, and all that remains of him is paper," observes Braithwaite. "Paper, ideas, phrases, metaphors, structured prose which turns into sound. This, as it happens, is precisely what he would have wanted; it's only his admirers who sentimentally complain." Braithwaite makes a doughty admirer indeed: zealous, dogged, properly crazed. His particular madeleine, his key to the past, is a stuffed green parrot he discovers in a Flaubert museum in Rouen. The author borrowed a stuffed bird while he was writing A Simple Heart, in which a parrot is the last object of a gentle old woman's affection. Looking into its beady eye, Braithwaite suddenly feels close to his own idol. But, he ruminates, "the writer's voice--what makes you think it can be located that easily?" Sure enough, in Croisset, the village where Flaubert lived, there is another collection of memorabilia, and, yes, another parrot. Undeterred, the narrator sets out to determine which little bundle of feathers is authentic.

The pleasure in this book lies in the way Barnes circulates among his historical and imaginary characters and in his agile writing strategies. Obviously he has pinched a thing or two from Nabokov, like the brazenness and wit of Pale Fire. Barnes concocts wonderful lists, full of unnerving distinctions: animals, for instance, an enumeration of Flaubert's many parrot references, along with the fact that there are no parrots in Madame Bovary. A chapter contains contrasting chronologies, one of the author's public career and honors, the other of his failures and the early deaths of many of his family and close friends. By the adroit use of such detail, Barnes builds a warmer personality for the novelist than his glacial public image. Flaubert's stiff shyness and pride, his solitary stance in life and self-described bearishness become signs of human vulnerability rather than the armor of an artist against the distractions of the world.

But in several chapters, Flaubert is of secondary interest. Braithwaite, it seems, has some sharp opinions that might well be held by a novelist or some other talented fellow connected to the literary-scholarly axis. What about the fashionable practice of providing two endings for a novel, as John Fowles did in The French Lieutenant's Woman? "If novelists truly wanted to simulate the delta of life's possibilities, this is what they'd do," instructs Braithwaite. "At the back of the book would be a set of sealed envelopes in various colours. Each would be clearly marked on the outside: Traditional Happy Ending; Traditional Unhappy Ending . . . Cliffhanger Ending; Dream Ending; Opaque Ending; Surrealist Ending; and so on. You would be allowed only one, and would have to destroy the envelopes you didn't select. That's what I call offering the reader a choice."

Braithwaite has many other literary convictions. He prefers Thackeray to Dickens; he is saving Virginia Woolf for "when I'm dead." He would like to impose bans on certain categories of novel: those in which a group of people, isolated by circumstance, revert to the "natural condition" of man; novels about incest; those set in Oxford or Cambridge. He would also impose a quota system on fiction set in South America, "to curb the spread of package-tour baroque and heavy irony."

The most ferocious scorn is reserved not for novelists but for scholars. A brilliant set-piece chapter called "Emma Bovary's Eyes" takes on the late Enid Starkie, Oxford don and Flaubert biographer, who disparaged the novelist for coloring his heroine's eyes in three different hues. When the relevant passages are cited, there is no real contradiction; what Flaubert was describing was the effect of emotions on the face. Scholarly critics, fumes Braithwaite, regard the most sublime creative geniuses as "some tedious old aunt in a rocking chair who . . . was only interested in the past, and hadn't said anything new for years. Of course, it's her house, and everybody's living in it rent free."

Flaubert's aunt, perhaps, instead of his parrot. The cheeky little irony is typical of Barnes. Brought up around London, he is the child of two French teachers, and he read French at Oxford. At 39, he has published two previous novels and held some Establishment literary jobs, including ones at the New Statesman and the Sunday Times. At the moment, he writes television criticism for the Observer. Under a pen name, Dan Kavanagh, he has produced two mysteries about a low-life London ex-policeman. They read fast and gamy, and --rare for a learned man who takes to writing suspense--they contain virtually no literary allusions. But then, wearing knowledge lightly is Barnes' great asset.