This is an odd book…a kind of novel in stories, but not one in which the stories are particularly connected together in terms of character or voice or plot. Instead they are thematically connected along a few various leitmotifs. One, is boats, ships and other such vessels playing along the the various ways in which boats are used as story elements and metaphors in the Bible.
The opening story involves a nonhuman narrator on the Ark. This opens up and elucidates some of the fog regarding the mythos of Noah’s ark and provides a kind of real world explanation for the ark — more than one boat, much much more rain, and a longer time on the water.
There’s a story involving a terrorist/kidnapping on a ship cruise. There’s a story about the proceedings of a legal dispute over the status of animals. There’s an art history conversation (very very similar to a lot of Flaubert’s Parrot) on the role of art in depicting human tragedy, asking the question in the title of this post. This chapter is explicitly asking about the early 19th century painting “The Raft of the Medusa” depicting a shipwreck. This whole conversation reminds me a lot of an early depiction of a smoke-stained painting of a whale toppling a clipper ship in Moby Dick.
So while the book is interesting and often very well written, I didn’t find a lot here to really sink my teeth into and felt it a little less a novel than I might have wanted. It’s almost like a less good blueprint of Cloud Atlas.
(Photo: https://www.amazon.com/History-World-10-Chapters/dp/0394580613/ref=sr_1_7?keywords=julian+barnes&qid=1557665848&s=gateway&sr=8-7)