A foaming abundance of fact
Eric Christiansen
CHRONICLE OF THE WORLD edited by Jerome Burne
Longman, £29.95, pp. 1296
When I was little, I was given a very big book: as big as a small boy, but flatter. `Elephant Folio' they used to call that size of book; it was Mrs Somebody's Grand Universal Chronology. About 30 coloured stripes ran across each page, representing the reigns of all the rulers in the world from the Flood, or at any rate from the drying- off period after it, down to the beginning of Queen Victoria's reign, which was when it was published. Imagine, from above, the railway-lines issuing from Waterloo to Charing Cross, before they begin to di- verge, and imagine sections of them dyed in purple, green, crimson and blue, proces- sing over snowy ground in parallel pomp not to Clapham Junction, but to the end of Time. It looked rather like that; but better than that.
It is the only book which has ever made sense of the history of the world, as far as I know. True, the method was ruthlessly reductive. The information was restricted to names, printed unobtrusively on either side of the tracks, but that was enough. The colours, the size, and the continuity made up for everything that was left out. It was simple, overwhelming, and adorable. Nevertheless, it got lost. I cannot even remember the name of the authoress. It left an aching void which has never been filled, and at times, a sense of despair as the tide of historiographical fashion ebbed away from such ventures.'
Never despair. Here is a nine-pounds- weight Chronicle storming into the best- seller category with a format and an appeal which invite comparison to the lost master- piece. It is far more complicated, of course, and it runs from the 'World before Humans' to 1988, not in mere stripes, but in crowded displays of narrative, pictures, maps, date-lists and essays, to a final parade of All the Countries in the World, their flags, statistics and potted history. It cannot be likened to the exit from Charing Cross Station; rather to a linear version of the Albert Memorial, sprayed with prose and paint regardless of expense. The stated aim of the people behind it is to achieve: UNIVERSAL APPEAL If it does not, the history of the world will have been a terrible waste of time. If it does, it will be because it is an object capable of inspiring awe and love, like the work of Mrs Somebody. It is so big, so beautiful, so barmy.
Not that there is much wrong with the prose parts. Like the conductress of Sweet Sue's Syncopated Swingers, the editor, Mr Burne, can say 'Remember this: every one of these girls is a virtuoso'. The contribu- tors are fine scholars with much to say, but not much experience of writing chronicles, even of this artificial kind. They concen- trate amazingly; which is a cunning way of keeping ideology out of the picture. A little intellectual fashion is injected now and then, but on the whole the scholars are just taps emitting a foaming abundance of fact; seldom have they been so usefully or harmlessly employed. They talk all at once, and no one is allowed to talk louder than the rest. Thus on one page, entries on `Barbarians sack Rome' and 'Romans withdraw troops from Britain' is balanced by 'Chinese artist excels at religious themes' and 'Sun Temple built of 150 million bricks'. On another, 'England and Scotland are united' is next to 'Mass suicide by Samurai warriors." Quake brings fire and floods to Lisbon' is the bad news for 1755: the good? — 'New priorities in French interior decor', of course. 'Jesus son of God is crucified' is strangely prom- inent with the datelines 'Jerusalem 30 April AD 30', considering that no contem- porary source records this event, but it would have been an uneventful year with- out it, to judge by the space-filler on the facing page: 'Cities of Provence acquire Roman style.' The headlines are there because the `Chronicle Philosophy' means reporting stories 'as though they had just happened', in a style that will mean something to people used to television and newspapers, but not to 'traditional books'. As philo- sophy goes, this makes sense; even so, the method is not always successful. The hot- news illusion is fine for some events, like the Lisbon earthquake, or the battle of Trafalgar, because they are the sort of things even journalists would notice; but any newspaper reader will suspect that most of the world's history would have been overlooked by most reporters as unimportant or dull.
After all, their job is to write what they see, not to anticipate what we see. And they sometimes get things wrong. The imaginary reporters on the Chronicle get everything right, and they know the future. This leads to such captions as 'Stanislaw Poniatowski: Poland's last king. Will there be another?' and the appearance of 'the powerful Prussian kingdom' in 1663, 50 years before it was invented. However, one authentic newspaper tradition is well supported by the frequent misprints. The headline on the Empress Theodora: `Courtesan who maimed Emperor, dies' really does suggest a Byzantine edition of the Guardian. The old girl did a lot of hurtful things in her time, but Justinian she only married.
Never mind all that. What matters is the enormous mass of images and information, the wild exuberance of the tome, resting heavily on the television sets of bookless Britain but radiating omniscience into the semi-darkness. It can only do good, unless you happen to drop it on to your foot.
However, the book is also interesting as the object of a promotion campaign that is likely to cost rather more than the quarter million pounds which launched its fore- runner, the Chronicle of the Twentieth Century. That one has sold three million copies, and has made a retail turnover of over five million pounds. Some of this money has been used by Longmans to commission an 85-foot-high hot-air balloon in the shape of a book, which has floated above '50 events all over Britain and Ireland,' and will no doubt terrify the unlettered populace into submission. I discovered that fact by reading a grossly triumphant hand-out headed 'The Chroni- cle Story — making bestsellers by breaking the rules.' I did not realise there were rules to break in the bestselling field, but I suppose there is always a first time for the flying of giant inflatable books, when some hopeless cave-dweller wonders whether there might be a bye-law against it. However, it is encouraging that such a delightful and dotty work should emerge from this blast of serious money-grabbing sales-talk. Somewhere in the vast organisa- tion that produced it, there must be some- body with a sense of humour.
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