Barnes's faulty French fancy

The French may be better than we are at trains, bread, pollarding, hospitals and spas, chocolate, ignoring regulations, puns, shower gel, butchering, motorways, the cinema, abstract vocabulary, association football and the ingenious use of verbena, but - let English patriots take heart - we beat them hollow at compiling an index.

What can you expect from a people which puts the table of contents at the end of their books? Something to Declare has an excellent index, from the hand of Julian Barnes or someone who shares his sense of humour: "cows: as intelligent as village girls, 128; bad pianist makes them flee, 240"; "Bicycles: used in Tour de France, 79-97"; "Amis, Sir Kingsley: limited zeal for Flaubert, xiv".

Contrast the Plèiade edition of Flaubert's correspondence, which Barnes rightly praises; it began to appear in 1973, is now four-fifths completed, already runs to 5,936 pages and doesn't even have lists of letters sorted according to addressee, let alone an index.

On the other hand, an index may have the disadvantage of being a bit of a giveaway. Barnes claims that his is "a France of the regions rather than the centre" yet he has nine page-references to Paris and only one to the Pyrenees. His French history omits Vichy, Indochina and Algeria; his French politics stop before Mitterrand and never stoop to the CGT.

The French intellectuals of these pages are Camus and Sartre, though Lacan gets one mention for having owned a painting; Barnes hums along to Jacques Brel but hasn't heard of Youssou N'Dour. He has noticed nothing particular that has happened in France since he was 25, except for the lorries (more of them now, deplorable.)

Considered as a book about France, Something to Declare is emaciated to the point of inanition. There are some comparative insights into the French soul for those who like that sort of thing - they have an "enviable ease with pleasure which so attracts the repressed English", though Mallarme lived a life of "feelings suppressed" and "if he weren't so French he could easily be English"; we have a "taste for the particular and local, coupled with a disregard for theory", a taste shared by the honorary rosbif Truffaut, who also was "wary of theory". We should be grateful Barnes doesn't feel he must alert us to the fact they drive on the other side of the road.

But, to adopt one of Barnes's own distinctions, this isn't a book, it's an assemblage, quilting together 20 years' worth of review-articles on the likes of Elizabeth David, Simenon, Chabrol, and, of course, Flaubert, about whom Barnes remains as admirably clinging an anorak as ever. He imagined himself as Geoffrey Braithwaite, a dim fan of the great novelist, in Flaubert's Parrot (1984) and one of the scant fascinations of Something to Declare lies in spotting the notions and phrases which found their way from Barnes's journalism of the early 1980s into his novel, or those which, true to his green convictions, he recycled from the novel into later copy: see, for example, Something to Declare, pages 169, 227, 253.

These left-overs from the TLS and similarly distinguished journals don't meld on reheating into a coherent and satisfying book; their original scrappiness becomes more pronounced. Barnes's writing is short-term in its methods and ambitions.

He constantly resorts to alliteration, that handy Viagra of flaccid prose straining for effect as the deadline looms - "he hurled himself with dangerous directness", "pluviose provinces", "more Greuze than Greer"; he has the semi-educated person's trust in big words as guarantors of imposing thought and so pleases himself with "hardly egregious" for "not unusual", refers to "minimalist bunting" when he means "a few flags" and thinks it fine writing to call people who like old trees "arboreal antiquarians". Pretentious, lui?

He has acquired a reputation for cleverness by simple methods which are safe for readers to try at home. Revere the calendar, saying "modern" or "modernist" quite often. You may be superficially self-critical about this habit - "things seem unquenchably novel when you are 18 because of an unawareness of context and prehistory" - but you must on no account take to heart or mind the truth of Flaubert's remark: "Our ignorance of history makes us slander our own time. Things have always been like this."