Elizabeth Finch: A novel

by Julian Barnes

And here she is working her way towards a lecture: —Had churches been less monotheistic and oppressive, had the expulsions of those Not Like Us not taken place, Britons would have mixed more freely, miscegenation would have become normal, and whiteness no indicator of superiority. So a society with fewer evident markers of status and money and power. British history might therefore have become the story of a country learning from otherness rather than ignoring and repressing it. In place of a country of conquest, viewed from the outside with anything from wary respect to intense loathing, a country which led the world (or part of the world) differently—as an example of those virtues, often present in the society if frequently overshadowed, of tolerance, liberalism, and a good-humoured openness to others. Harder to achieve from our present position. So much self-propaganda to be unlearnt, so much getting our history wrong. Of course all this, if stated publicly, would attract the usual anathematising: defeatist, self-loathing, pinko, a watering-down of true English and British blood, enemies of the state, etc., etc. But DNA tests invariably surprise “white” people by showing a multiplicity of “origins.” The folly of racial purity. In its place, an exaltation of what conservative fantasists would call “the mongrel state”: yet this is not an ambition, rather an acknowledgement of what is there anyway and everywhere.