In Departure(s), Julian Barnes’ playful new novel about a number of of his lifelong obsessions — mortality, reminiscence, and time — the writer broadcasts that after publishing 27 books over the previous 44 years, “this may positively be my final e book — my official departure, my last dialog with you.”
Certainly, he jests? Barnes, who describes himself as a “cheerful pessimist,” turned 80 this month. He additionally has a longstanding curiosity in endgames — each endings and video games. Writing, he says, remains to be “one of many instances I really feel most alive and unique,” however he worries about repeating himself, or going stale, or “lapsing into the simple garrulity of autobiography.” Self-determined retirement has the benefit of assuring in opposition to being reduce off mid-project — and worse, of getting another person clumsily full his orphaned e book. Nonetheless, he backslided fairly shortly after swearing off interviews some 10 years in the past — lasting solely till the publication of his very subsequent e book.
Departure(s) is billed as a novel. It’s narrated by a author named Julian (“Jules”), a self-declared agnostic/atheist who ready for COVID lockdown by ordering a 30-DVD boxed set of Ingmar Bergman movies. This narrator, just like the writer, was devastated by the sudden demise of his spouse (literary agent Pat Kavanagh) to mind most cancers in 2008, and has since misplaced many buddies, together with fellow writers Christopher Hitchens and Martin Amis, to different types of the illness. He relays his personal medical saga, together with his analysis in early 2020 with an incurable however manageable type of leukemia, which is stored in verify with day by day chemotherapy drugs. He feedback wryly: “‘Incurable but manageable,’ that appears like…life, would not it?”
It takes Barnes some time to get to the story on the core of this e book, which includes school classmates he launched to one another whereas they had been at Oxford College with him within the Nineteen Sixties. Barnes calls this couple, whom he promised by no means to put in writing about, Jean and Stephen. All of them parted methods after commencement, and largely fell out of contact till 40 years later, once they had been of their 60s. Stephen, long-divorced, contacts Barnes and asks him to assist reconnect with Jean. Barnes fortunately obliges, glad to have one other go as matchmaker. Each Stephen and Jean confide individually that they think about their rekindled relationship their “final shot at happiness.”
As a novelist, Barnes is used to enjoying god, manipulating his characters’ lives and emotions. He notes that he has written about love steadily, although “few of my characters have ever been granted a cheerful ending.” Jean argues that novelists actually do not get love. May this be true, Barnes wonders. Certainly not the nice novelists, who he feels “perceive love, and most facets of human behaviour, higher than, say, psychiatrists or scientists or philosophers or monks or lonely-hearts columnists.”
Barnes’ central concern right here isn’t a lot with how Jean and Stephen’s relationship performs out, however with endings typically, each literary and in any other case, and with tales and reminiscences “with a lacking center,” just like the 40 yr hole in his buddies’ love story. Fiction, he notes, “requires the gradual composting of life earlier than it turns into usable materials.” It additionally has the benefit over nonfiction of enabling writers to fill in blanks the place details stay elusive.
Like a lot of Barnes’ work, Departure(s) makes an attempt to synthesize a number of strands in a wily (and typically unruly) hybrid of autobiography, essay, fiction and autofiction that’s thick with musings about Proust and different French writers, involuntary reminiscence, and getting old. (“It’s best to do one factor or the opposite,” sharp-tongued Jean admonishes him about his discursive strategy to narrative.)
As all the time, Barnes underscores his ideas with trenchant quotes from his interior Bartlett’s, together with this excellent parenthetical comment: “What did T.S. Eliot say about reminiscence? That regardless of the way you wrap it in camphor, the moths will get in.”
Even when Departure(s) doesn’t become Barnes’ capstone, it’s a welcome addition to his bibliography, exhibiting extra in frequent along with his best hits — together with his breakthrough third novel, Flaubert’s Parrot and his 2011 Booker Prize-winner, The Sense of An Ending — than his most up-to-date novel, the disappointingly flat Elizabeth Finch.
Departure(s) is slim however weighty, digressive but incisive. The plot is just about irrelevant. Though the e book encompasses a considerably difficult, not solely dependable narrator, it provides us unprecedented entry to the ideas and emotions of this terribly fascinating, erudite author who professes to view life as, “at greatest, a lightweight comedy with a tragic ending.” A light-weight comedy with a tragic ending — that just about sums up Departure(s).
