Julian Barnes, Departure(s)

Julian Barnes, Departure(s), (Jonathan Cape)

'Fiction Review' is a dubious label for the Julian Barnes swansong. He's a novelist and novels are fictional but he's also a writer of this 'hybrid' stuff - part fiction, part true- except there's not much imaginary material in the mix this time. And so we are already into the sort of discursion that he specializes in so elegantly himself. The book discusses itself, we discuss the book and find that although we might have covered a lot of ground most eruditely we've got no further than any other liberal, left, London elite dinner party.

IAM is involuntary autobigraphical memory, sometimes brought on by a stroke, and can be much more severe than that brought on by Proust's madeleine. It can get as bad as one girl who could remember every detail of every day of her life and turns out to be a terrible curse. It's far worse to be able to recall everything than to have a dubious, selective memory that has at least edited out a big proportion of raw material. But it's a great subject with which to open what is essentially a memoir by a writer who often used unreliable narrators.

The central, main part of the book relates the relationship between Jean and Stephen, two friends brought together by Barnes at Oxford and then again, forty years later, at Stephen's request. Barnes becomes confidant to both parties, with far too much involvement in the difficulties of the relationship which he candidly shares with his readers now that they are both dead. While at first this might seem pruriently fascinating, it is soon more than one wants to know especially for those of us who like the wording of the law about 'between consenting adults in private'. The stratifications of Barnes's many-layered writing have probably never gone as deep but there must be a limit to how much we want to know.

In summary, Stephen loves Jean more than she wants him to. She feels the need of more 'freedom'. It occurs to him that she might want more than him and while that doesn't seem to be the case in their later role as 're-kindlers', Barnes is aware at first hand that first time around she very nearly did.

All of which has to be unpacked at some length in the sort of coda that Barnes has gone into before, investigating all the implications not only of 'love' but age, dementia, loss and literature. It's a short book and is readily soon read because he's never less than a pleasure to read but one still wonders if such exhaustive analysis was necessary or if, over the three years it took him to write it, he was stretching it out to make it book length. One can lose sympathy for the perceived sufferings of the well-to-do intelligentsia if the intricacies of why two people find themselves to be incompatible twice over is the most they have to worry about.

And so it's farewell from Julian Barnes, still one of the finest writers of his generation even if by the end, almost inevitably, he was in danger of becoming a parody of himself. At least he was well-organized enough not to leave his last book unfinished.