Julian Barnes - Elizabeth Finch

Julian Barnes, Elizabeth Finch (Jonathan Cape)

Like Flaubert's Parrot, A History of the World in 10 1/2 Chapters and others to a lesser extent, Elizabeth Finch is another Julian Barnes 'novel of ideas'. A considerable amount of it is surely 'research' more than it is fiction but most importantly it is 'writing' and fine writing.  It's not a tale with cliff-hanging chapter endings but it would still be a page-turner in the appropriate hands.

One might compare Elizabeth Finch with Miss Jean Brodie or even the real-life Monica Jones as a charismatic teacher and the comparison would find similarities in their idiosyncracies and contrasts in the ideas she evinced. Neil, as narrator, had been a mature student of hers, remained in contact with her and was close enough to inherit her notebooks and an acquaintanceship with her brother. She becomes his subject as he moves towards writing a memoir about her and, in turn, the central section of the book is taken up by his essay on her subject, Julian the Apostate, the last Pagan Emperor of Rome who,

attempted to turn back the disastrous flood tide of Christianity.

Those dissenters from the ecclesiastical among us immediately realize we are onto something and concentrate a bit harder from that sentence onwards, liking much of what we read. Reviewing Peter Doherty and Frédéric Lo a few weeks ago, I couldn't see where The Guardian's reviewer's objections lay and again, although it's Sam Byers this time, I can't fathom how he can concern himself so much with the perceived absence of personality in Elizabeth and spend almost no time on Julian the Apostate whose ideas and alternative history are obviously the point.

Elizabeth is an object of fascination for her students because she is private but her cultural critique of all things 'mono', from monopoly to monoglot but most crucially monotheism is what makes her the pluralist, insightful and, if it is still possible, optimistic heroine she is. Or, as the vehicle for Barnes's liberal, intellectual elite agenda, something we should remember is nothing to be ashamed of after the battering the referendum, the Age of Boris, Trump and Putin have inflicted on our modest idealism.

In Elizabeth's notebooks is a disparate list of authors that includes Hitler as well as Thom Gunn, the latter being a clue to any Gunn scholar that they are those that wrote about Julian although his poem is dismissed in Neil's survey as 'a baffling homage-poem'. It is the quote from Swinburne about the 'pale Galilean' that is given more attention and the line of thought that 'getting history wrong' is who we are and the obvious absurdity that,

the religion into which you are born , or have chosen to adopt, just happens to be the one sect which is true among hundreds of heathen creeds and apostasies out there,

which either results in or results from the 'crooked timber of humanity'.

 

Admirers of Barnes, and there is no other novelist writing today that I prefer reading, will treasure this. It took no more than about four hours to read and, while it does all that it needs to do and needs to be no longer, that means the wait for the next Barnes begins all the sooner. Readers who want a story to follow or find him a bit too heavy on ideas will wonder what the point was, I dare say, but it sends me first back to the Gunn poem which, being early Gunn, fetishises on his rule of law and violent death rather than his stand against one god rather than many, and then to see whatever else there might be about Julian of who it might be asked, as it was of George Best, 'Oh, Julian, where did it all go wrong?'