Julian Barnes - Pulse

Julian Barnes, Pulse (Jonathan Cape)

Every so often one sees an article about how difficult it is to market books of short stories. Not only is that a shame but I don’t understand quite why it should be either.
Icons of literature like Joyce and Salinger have volumes of short stories among their finest work, there are great specialists in the genre like Katherine Mansfield, Maupassant and William Trevor and, at their best, short stories provide the perfectly-sized piece to read in the bath or at bedtime. I don’t like the idea that any writing is written for a specific market or made to fit a certain size because I’d prefer it if writers could write exactly what they feel the need to write but, sadly, most writing is inevitably produced with a market in mind. But not much of that need apply if you happen to be Julian Barnes, who presumably by now exercises more control over his output than most and whose publishers are likely to be grateful for what they are given.
This new book is divided into two parts, the first very contemporary and each alternate one set at Phil and Joanna’s where a group of friends provide dialogue at dinner parties. While immaculately observed, the very credibility of the conversation makes it difficult to judge whether Barnes is capturing the middle-class zeitgeist, satirizing it or presenting the reader with an awkward encounter with their own likely attitudes, anxieties and would-be wit. Global warming, the smoking ban, recycling and the sex lives of the middle classes are their main areas of interest. In a recognizable mix of concern, complacency and guilt. When one of them says, ‘I can’t tell if you’re being ironic or not.’ and they reply, ‘Neither can I.’, the dinner parties and these stories are summarized very neatly. In the last story of this section, Marriage Lines, the woman of an unmarried couple on a walking holiday in the Hebrides wears a wedding ring for form’s sake, which makes ‘them feel both superior and hypocritical at the same time’ and that might apply to much of Barnes’ accounts here of relationships.
East Wind is a topical story of a very downbeat English affair between an Estate Agent and a waitress from Eastern Europe that ends rather abruptly while Gardener’s World shows a marriage defined by attitudes to the garden with the man interested in growing fruit and vegetables and the woman gaining influence with her preference for wisteria and more decorous flora and fauna.
The second section is themed around the senses and are immediately more literary, impressive and accomplished in a different way.
The Limner is about an itinerant deaf, mute portrait painter and the somehow inevitable tension between his ways of seeing the world and the expectations of those prosperous enough to employ him to paint their portraits.
A tremendous moment comes with the disarmingly simple last line of Complicity, which after detailing the early stages of a relationship and a sort of meditation on aesthetic themes, it ends,
And then I touched her.
Harmony is another story on a theme of misunderstood motives in a basically unsympathetic world, in which innovative medical practice involving magnetism temporarily cures a pianists blindness in a big European city beginning with a V in the time of Haydn and Mozart. I don’t know where that could be and I don’t know why the old ruse of deleting precise fictional dates, places and names is used. But it’s interesting that she needs to be taught to play again having had her sight restored, when being able to see her fingers on the keyboard ruin her ability to play. And, of course, when the healer is demonized and the pianist returned to her family, she goes blind again.
The final story, Pulse, is about the sense taste of taste and perhaps also a sense of taste as well the closing down of the senses and as such is the most compelling and moving in the book. Barnes’ writing is exquisite at times and a transparent window at others in an age when prose style doesn’t seem to be the issue it might once have been. He is a candidate for the title of most accomplished English prose fiction writer and on this form is perhaps ahead of MacEwan, Boyd and Sebastian Faulks with Ishiguro somewhere thereabouts but they all have Alan Hollinghurst to think about, too, and with him due along in the Spring with his most broad-canvas novel yet, they might have some thinking to do.