The Odd Couple of Europe : STORIES : CROSS CHANNEL,<i> By Julian Barnes (Alfred A. Knopf: $21; 211 pp.)</i>

In the 1860s, a bourgeois family takes a Sunday excursion out of Rouen to gawk at an encampment of British laborers engaged in building the railroad line from Paris. The red-faced giants are reported to shovel 20 tons of earth apiece each day and to devour 12 pounds of beef.

A bluff Englishman of the John Bull variety falls into conversation at a Paris bar in the 1920s. Soon he finds himself a guest at a Surrealist seminar on sex, being grilled with mock pedantry about his favorite positions and whether he has ever lusted after a nun or a rabbit--and not quite answering. “Almost like betraying your country, talking smut to a group of foreigners,” he explains to his nephew years later. “Unpatriotic, don’t you think?”

Two Englishwomen buy a decaying Bordeaux wine property at the turn of the century and fail, happily, to modernize it. An Oxford Dictionary proofreader, sister of a World War I soldier buried in Flanders, carries on a lifelong feud with the War Graves Commission over the syllable breaks in the engraved epitaphs. A carriage-load of English cricketers sets off for a goodwill match in Paris just as the French Revolution is breaking out.

The 10 stories in “Cross Channel” are a dazzling kaleidoscope; each proceeds in half-turns that jolt the pattern from farce to mournfulness, from shrewd remark to cultural meditation, from anecdote to epiphany. Julian Barnes, Britain’s wittiest and most cosmopolitan living writer (his only possible competition being Muriel Spark and Penelope Fitzgerald, both of whom he partly resembles) has taken an old chestnut and made it flower.

The English and the French are Europe’s most ancient and obsessive national pairing. Imagine two porcupines as comma-shaped yin nestled to inverted-comma yang, mutually inseparable and intolerable. The Franco-German feud lasted for only the century and a half between Napoleon and Hitler. The English and the French began theirs in the Middle Ages and carry on to this day.

“They burned our little Joan of Arc,” an old Frenchwoman told my wife when we lived in Paris a dozen years ago. On a reporting visit I made to the nuclear submarine installation at Toulon, the officers suggested that, though their targetry was set for the Soviet Union, they would have been just as happy to fight the British.

They were pulling a visitor’s leg but the tugs were not entirely playful. Yet many of the words specific to navies rather than armies--north, south, east, west, for instance--entered the French language from English, even as the words for so many other things entered English from French.

In “Cross Channel,” Barnes’ antic and self-parodying English musings upon the French mind pick up where he left off in “Flaubert’s Parrot.” He dramatizes and expands them into fictions--some are his best--that suggest mutual completion through mutual misapprehension; here are national differences so long cherished as to become part of a national sensibility.

Barnes keeps us pleasurably off-balance. We read these stories as we might ride a horse that is a little more than we can manage, we become riders who surprise ourselves. “Experiment” begins with Uncle Freddie driveling on with various versions of how he met the Surrealists. In one, he tells his bar companion that he is a salesman of genuine wax (it comes out “cire realiste”). In another he is attached to a cross-country car rally (“Sire, je suis rallyiste”). Our patience may be strained.

But it is enough to induce his bar-mate--Andre Breton, perhaps, or Jacques Prevert--to take him off to the Surrealist colloquy as a picturesque British trophy. The story becomes a hilarious three-part fugue: the French intellectuals having fun with an English dolt, the Englishman sure he has got the patriotic best of the decadent French and the Francophile narrator--Freddie’s nephew--wearily complaining of his uncle as a chauvinistic bore.

One of the finest stories, “Melon,” keeps changing its shape and quality. In the first part, the agreeable, jaunty young Lord Lindsay is making the obligatory continental tour with his tutor in 1775. A letter to his cousin and fiancee is full of cultural goodwill; it is also immensely blinkered.

Fifteen years later, without transition, we see the same Lord Lindsay heading for Dover with another aristocratic friend and the servants they keep for their skill at cricket. The British minister to France had suggested that a match would be just the thing to ease tensions in the agitated climate of 1789. Instead, the minister himself has had to flee to Dover, and the inns are thronged with French emigres.

In the last scene, Lord Lindsay is a general, captured by Napoleon and held comfortably as a hostage. The tone has darkened; afflicted with what seems to be senile melancholia, Lindsay raves about the aborted cricket match that might have prevented all the bloodshed. The story is a marvel of comic and ironic complexity: Barnes suggests the immense historic gulf between the liberal British and the revolutionary French minds.

In the final piece, a ruminative epilogue, the narrator--Barnes himself--weaves memories while riding the new Chunnel train from London to Paris. It is a dream catalog of other trips that took much longer.

The years of the writer--Barnes, in his 40s, imagines himself in his 60s--were marked from childhood not so much by birthdays as by train journeys to Dover, Folkestone and Southampton, then by ferry to Calais, Dieppe and Cherbourg, and on by train to Paris. The names, with so much history in them, are gone: There is only the sleek new train with no compartments to provide encounters--he recalls an ambiguously romantic encounter with a tall Swiss woman--no stops and, instead of a dining-car interlude, trays brought to the seat.

Time expands and contracts like an accordion of the mind. He speculates on a middle-aged woman across from him; perhaps she is a retired stripper at the Crazy Horse, going back for a reunion. He offers her a glass of the half-bottle of Meursault he has brought, along with a homemade sandwich. (If no dining cars then, for goodness’ sake, at least no trays.) She takes a sip and astonishes him by declaring it only passable. She is a professional on her way to a wine tasting.

Things change--a woman wine expert was once unheard of--but the English still go to France for that part of their souls that require something foreign. Barnes imagines a Frenchman his age traveling the other way, gazing at the Kent hop-fields, entranced by marmalade, Devonshire cream-teas, bowler hats, black cabs and British phlegm.

“Sentimentality, that was sometimes the charge against him for his view of the French. If accused he would always plead guilty, claiming in mitigation that this is what other countries are for. It was unhealthy to be idealistic about your own country, since the least clarity of vision led swiftly to disenchantment. Other countries therefore existed to supply the idealism; they were a version of pastoral.”

“Cross Channel” has been delayed and will be available in bookstores in April.