The View From the Margins.

• Author: Hitchens, Peter
• Position: Review

Norman Davies, The Isles (New York: Oxford University Press, 1999), 1200 pp., $45.

FUTURE historians of Europe will marvel at the speed of Britain's disintegration in the sixty years that followed its finest hour in 1940. They may well conclude that this disintegration was the price paid for that brief, astonishing moment when one country, bankrupt and all but beaten, still held the pass against the combined powers of tyranny. Today, few especially in the United States, realize that a great nation has already ceased to exist, and that its fragments are about to be rearranged in an utterly different form. However, in England, Wales, Scotland and Ireland the first shock of dissolution has already passed, and the writing of epitaphs, obituaries and eulogies of the departed nation has become a flourishing industry.

Norman Davies, author of a powerful account of Poland's past and of an original, energetic and encyclopedic history of Europe, has produced a timely and cunning reworking of what British people rather sentimentally used to call Our Island Story. The key to his approach is found in the title itself, which flatly refuses to use the standard term for the group of damp, green, cramped islands off the French coast. Davies accurately points out that large parts of this archipelago are not now British at all, that they were only united under one crown for a brief 120 years, and that the process of disintegration is likely to accelerate in the near future. Correct as it may be, this attitude is calculated and probably mischievously intended to annoy traditionalists and even many who did not think of themselves as traditionalists, who will say that he is quibbling and pedantic--while wondering whether he is right.

MOST OF US do not learn history as we do mathematics or foreign languages, dispassionately and logically. The knowledge comes to us at a tender time of life when we are not very willing to see both sides of a question or to find fault with our own culture. It is the lore of our tribe, a series of stories that are sometimes uplifting, sometimes filled with warnings, but which combine to give us a picture of the culture from which we believe we have emerged and which we expect to serve in our own lives and continue for our children. Without some sort of grasp of national history--which includes a certain amount of pride, a fair number of honorable victories or even more honorable defeats, the regular triumph of good and the recovery of lost domains and fortunes--it would be difficult to accomplish Edmund Burke's idea of civilization being based on a permanent, self-renewing pact between the dead, the living and the unborn. We need to revere our ancestors. We treasure our national myths while we are children, an d even as adults we do not like to see them dissected or exposed to the hard, cold light of scientific research. This is why the discoveries of researchers--who tell us that Parson Weems made up the story of Washington and the Cherry Tree or that Joan of Arc did not save France--are so often greeted with groans of annoyance and disbelief.

Davies willfully sets out to produce such groans. He pointedly gives supposedly English kings their French names, on the reasonable grounds that this is what they would have called themselves, since they were French and could not speak English. He undermines favorite stories about King Richard the Lionheart, Magna Carta, and Shakespeare's hugely unfair portrait of the Scottish King Macbeth.

He begins British history at an imagined point where the national territory did not even exist, and was not yet separated by water from the European continent. He delves, for many pages, in the great unknown times before the Romans and the many other invaders arrived on what many readers will still defiantly call British soil. He repeatedly challenges the conventional understanding of events, correctly pointing out that...