We usually have to wait until at least the first sentence to discover what a Julian Barnes novel is about. His latest tells us on the front cover. Departure(s) is a book of leave-taking: from family, from friends, and also from us. Barnes has blood cancer – manageable, but there are “no operations, no radiotherapy, just chemo in pill form until I die”. Departure(s) is to be his final book.
But don’t reach for the Kleenex just yet, this is no misery memoir. Barnes’s signature doughty rationalism allows him to face the end without sentimentality blocking the view. Indeed, with its familiar obsessions, characters and call-backs to the Barnes canon, Departure(s) belies its title: it is also a book of returns.
I say “book” rather than “novel”, because the form is purposely unclear, mixing fiction, essay and memoir, and is narrated by a character called Julian Barnes, who may or may not be a replica of the author himself.
Departure(s) arrives in five parts. These largely alternate between Barnes’s own predicament – the medical infelicities, the comedy, trials and pleasures of ageing – and the “true story” of his time with Jean and Steve, a couple whose twice-failed relationship Barnes is a witness to: first at Oxford and again 40 years later, having not seen either of them in the intervening decades. Echoing his Booker Prize-winning novel The Sense of an Ending (2011) this means that the “story has a large hole in the middle”, into which Barnes pours his thoughts on the nature of memory, with all its slippages and semi-conscious evasions.
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Barnes may have been pinned as the straight man of English letters – refined, respectable, quieter than his former New Statesman colleagues Martin Amis and Christopher Hitchens (who make cameos here) – but that is to miss his archly inventive streak. The metafictional games are on full show in Departure(s).
How reliable is the narrator, who remembers “what he wants to remember”? How seriously should we take Barnes’s “guilt” at his role in Jean and Steve’s relationship breakdowns (“I had brought them together the first time, in the caff, and then again the second time, in the same place, with the same ultimate result”)? Do we know whether Steve and Jean are actually real people? That last one, at least, is easy: of course not. What matters is that Barnes makes them seem real, even if – or perhaps especially because – they resemble protagonists from Before She Met Me (1982) and Staring at the Sun (1986) respectively.
More broadly, there is a coy weariness with the mechanics of fiction: “you know the form: who, where, when, why; what the weather was like and if that was relevant”. The narrator puts this down to age: “As writers get older, either they grow egotistically expansive or they think: contain yourself and cut to the chase.” Except what is being chased here? Less a narrative than a model of the mind remembering.
Take the prose. The typical Barnes sentence tends to be precise, demotic, well-mannered but with a tendency to erupt, to delicious or alarming effect. But in Departure(s), Barnes’s sentences are more digressive, more inclined to turn back upon themselves and simulate the act of writing in real time: “She was – what adjective might we have used back then – perhaps buzzy? No that sounds a word for an older person. Dashing? Too 1920s.”
The re-grooving of phrases is also a knowing iteration of something fundamental: “when I was younger, I thought I knew what the world was like… the need for self-correction comes with age, like the habit of repetition”. And yet even here we wonder how to take the narrator. Yes, he dismisses some ideas from his debut, Metroland (1980), as “beguiling romantic fantasy”. But, on many of the big issues, Barnes appears to have changed very little: God is still a “monstrous figment”, the universe is still just “doing its stuff”, the Tories are still bad, and so on. Sometimes this can have the tinge of self-congratulation, but Barnes is pretty sharp at calling this out in himself (“what self-importance and vanity”; “it sounded a bit pompous, I know”).
What we are left with is a conversation between Barnes the author and Barnes the person on whom we, the reader, have the pleasure of eavesdropping on for one last time. Julian Barnes has achieved that rare thing: a departure on his terms, with a moving work that returns us to his oeuvre once again.
Departure(s)
Julian Barnes
Jonathan Cape, 176pp, £18.99
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[Further reading: Chess is fiction’s favourite metaphor]
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