SOURCE: “Julian Barnes (1946-),” in British Writers, edited by George Stade and Carol Howard, Charles Scribner's Sons, 1997, pp. 65–76.

[In the following essay, Birkerts provides an overview of Barnes's career and major works.]

Julian Barnes once remarked—or, better, proclaimed—that “in order to write, you have to convince yourself that it's a new departure not only for you but for the entire history of the novel” (quoted in Stout, p. 68). This is a young man's take-on-all-comers kind of statement, and one that Barnes may have regretted making as soon as the reporter packed up her notebook and left; it tells us, however, that the writer not only harbors a great ambition but also sustains a commitment to literary seriousness that is uncommon at the end of the twentieth century.

Few writers even think in terms of history and departures from it—these are modernist, not post-modernist, preoccupations. Which brings us to a paradox: How is it that the author of two defiantly postmodern novels—Flaubert's Parrot (1984) and A History of the World in 10[frac12] Chapters (1989)—can still strike the reader as essentially a modernist? The answer, perhaps, is that Barnes is a writer determined to have it all ways; that he has adopted a coolly cerebral modernist stance that is flexible enough to accommodate some postmodern dalliance, but never in a way that would be binding. The postmodernist stance all but condemns a writer to ironic distance. Barnes, a consummate ironist, nonetheless reserves the right to get serious without the telltale arching of the brow.

Barnes's claim about the novelist's mission may strike some as being grandiose, but one could argue that in spirit at least he has made good on it. That is, of all the inventive and prolific writers in his approximate generation (including Martin Amis, Graham Swift, Salman Rushdie, and Ian McEwan), Barnes seems the most deeply pledged to the ideal of incessant transformation, moving in a mere decade and a half from a fairly conventional coming-of-age novel, Metroland (1980), to the bold collagism of Flaubert's Parrot, to the vast word-cycle of A History of the World in 10[frac12] Chapters, to the historicopolitical investigation of The Porcupine (1992). Alongside these bolder departures, Barnes was also producing his quieter, but no less singular, books—the novels Before She Met Me (1982), Staring at the Sun (1986), Talking It Over (1991), the nonfiction prose of Letters from London (1995), and the story collection Cross Channel (1996). Although he is prolific, Barnes gives no signs of being hurried. The prose is ever calm and manicured, and even when Barnes modulates into freer idioms, whether the wordplay of A History of the World in 10[frac12] Chapters or the saltier expressions of, say, Talking It Over, we always feel that we are in the hands of a meticulous artificer.

The question may be fairly asked whether Barnes has not spread himself over a wide area at some sacrifice of depth and penetration. The novels are seen to say this and that without gathering the central momentum that makes a writer's oeuvre truly commanding. And it is true—one can set down a Barnes novel and feel that issues and situations have been cunningly worked up but that certain deeper truths and implications remain undisturbed. Another critic, however, might counter in several ways. First, by suggesting that various though the works are, they do mount a recursive exploration of certain themes—faith and faithlessness in human relations, for example, or the subjective constructedness and inevitable relativeness of all truths. Second, by proposing that while Barnes has run through a gamut of experimental possibilities in his writing, the later works, especially the stories in Cross Channel, show greater density and greater concern for the specific characters that he has created.

EARLY LIFE AND FIRST NOVEL

Julian Barnes was born in Leicester, England, on 19 January 1946. His parents, Albert and Kaye, were teachers in French, a fact which may in some way account for the prominence of France and things French in many of his writings. Barnes's family moved to a London suburb when the boy was ten, and Julian won a scholarship to a private boys' school in the city. Barnes has given a few hints about his upbringing in interviews. As one profile expressed it, his parents “raised their two sons in a typically English spirit of sound middle-class caution, stability and routine. … Times-reading agnostics, they were moderate in their politics but fanatical about gardening. … Julian and his elder brother, Jonathan (now a philosophy don), were the first of their family to attend Oxbridge” (Stout, p. 72).

At Oxford, Barnes moved from languages (he had studied French and Russian intensively at City of London School) to psychology and philosophy. Neither of these disciplines gratified sufficiently, and after graduation Barnes found himself adrift. He ended up working as a lexicographer on a supplement to the Oxford English Dictionary. When he became disenchanted with the incessant pursuit of usages and variations, he thought he might read for the bar. En route to a possible career in contract law, Barnes was again derailed, now by reviewing books for the Times Literary Supplement, the New Statesman, and other publications. By the age of thirty he had become a full-time book and television critic. And then, in 1980, he published his first novel under his own name, Metroland.

Well paced, smartly written, and wearing its J. D. Salinger qualities lightly, Metroland tells the coming-of-age story of Chris Lloyd and his friend Toni. The novel begins in 1963. The boys are in their waning teen years, living in the eponymous Metroland, a suburban outcropping of London, and they are seasoning their rebellion with a defiantly French bohemianism. Barnes has great fun skewering the pretensions of these two mates:

Toni and I were strolling along Oxford Street, trying to look like flâneurs. This wasn't as easy as it might sound. For a start, you usually needed a quai or, at the very least, a boulevard; and, however much we might be able to imitate the aimlessness of the flânerie itself, we always felt that we hadn't quite mastered what happened at each end of the stroll.

(p. 17)¹

Like many first novels, Metroland is less interesting in itself than for what it reveals about its young author. In Barnes's case, it is safe to assume—at least to a point—that we are reading cunningly remastered self-portraiture, if not autobiography. Chris, who has been given Barnes's own birth year, casts a cold eye on the idiosyncrasies of his parents. “On my right,” he observes, “my father had The Times folded back at the stock-exchange prices and was murmuring his way down them. … From time to time he would toss my mother a dutiful question about the garden” (p. 40).

Part 2 of the novel jumps forward to 1968. We find Chris living in Paris on a research grant. “I installed my few possessions, greased up to the concierge, Mme Huet, in her den of houseplants and diarrhoeic cats … registered at the Bibliothèque Nationale (which wasn't too conveniently close) and began to fancy myself, at long last, as an autonomous being” (p. 85).

While in Paris Chris meets Annick, loses his virginity, and, in letters to Toni, tries to gloss over his sense of betraying the old friendship by growing up. As Chris philosophizes to himself: “The enemies who had given us common cause were no longer there; our adult enthusiasms were bound to be less congruent than our adolescent hates” (p. 97).

Nearing the end of his stay in Paris, Chris meets a group of young fellow Brits and falls in love with one of their number, Marion. Parting with Annick, he ends a chapter of his sentimental education. A look back over the shoulder compresses the whole adventure: “Ask me what I did in 1968 and I'll tell you: worked on my thesis … fell in love, had my heart chipped; improved my French; wrote a lapidary volume, issued in a handwritten edition of one; did some drawing; made some friends; met my wife” (p. 128).

And indeed, when we reconnect with Chris in part 3, it is 1977 and he is married to Marion, settled, and in essential conflict with his old friend Toni, who now as writer-critic still espouses the old antiauthoritarian line. But now Chris is threatened, feels judged. Pay lip service as he may to those old ideals, he is safely grown into what he warned himself against. He has moved, though, from the abrasive sarcasm of youth to the roomier ironies of young middle-age—roomy, that is, in that they can accommodate all manner of private regrets: “On Saturday afternoon, as I track the lawn mower carefully across our sloping stretch of grass, rev, slow, brake, turn and rev again, making sure to overlap the previous stripe, don't think I can't still quote you Mallarmé” (p. 174).

Metroland ends with a final image of the domesticated rebel awake in the small hours of the night. He is staring out the kitchen window at the street lamp: “The lamp snaps off, and I am left with a lozenge-shaped blue-green after-image. I continue to stare; it diminishes, and then, in its turn, and in its quieter way, snaps off” (p. 176).

Though Metroland is in many ways a young man's book, its attitudes and energies familiar from other such books, it does allow us to catch glimpses of what will become some of Barnes's signature themes. The friendship-become-opposition of Chris and Toni will surface in various guises in Before She Met Me and Talking It Over, both of which use the betrayal of one friend by another as part of their core premise. This first novel also deploys the England-France opposition, which turns up, to greater and lesser degree, in Before She Met Me and Flaubert's Parrot, and becomes a full-blown preoccupation in Cross Channel.

The novel is, further, very much a written work, the product of a stylist with a strong pull toward Nabokovian artifice. Significantly, though, Barnes is not a thoroughgoing artificer. Rather, his writing is governed by a kind of ticktock pattern, with the more crafted books alternating with the less adorned presentations. Thus, Metroland, Flaubert's Parrot, Staring at the Sun, and A History of the World in 10[frac12] Chapters are counterbalanced by Before She Met Me, Talking It Over, and The Porcupine, all of which rally to a more realist banner. The reader must at least question whether Barnes is not in some fundamental way a writer divided against himself. We think not only of the symbolic opposition between the dutiful Chris and the renegade Toni, but also of the aesthetic divergence from work to work; if that were not enough, there is the fact that in addition to writing literary works under his own name, Barnes has written a number of genre mysteries under the name of Dan Kavanagh. But then, such surmises are as dubious in their ultimate merit as they are intriguing to ponder.

BEFORE SHE MET ME AND FLAUBERT'S PARROT

Barnes's second literary novel, Before She Met Me, was published in 1982. A slight work, it rides more on conceptual cleverness and deftness of execution than upon any greater substance. The plot conceit is simple, and probable only if you grant the all-consuming force of passion, in this case expressed as sexual jealousy. Graham Hendrick is sent by his former wife to a movie that his present wife, Ann, acted in (before she met him). In the movie, Ann plays the part of an adulteress, and with the ironclad logic of the insecure, Graham not only conceives the idea that she had a lurid sexual past, but also begins to wonder if she might not be deceiving him in the present. Graham confides his fears to his friend Jack—the man who originally introduced him to Ann—and who had once, we learn, been involved with her. No matter what advice Jack offers—that Graham should try “wanking” (masturbating), for example—the obsession with finding out the truth about his wife keeps growing stronger. Graham continues to seek out revival movie houses that show films Ann acted in, and before long he experiences a breakdown. From there it is but a short step to a paranoid's retribution scheme, and Graham's leads finally to his stabbing Jack and then killing himself. All because his ex-wife suggested he see a certain movie—how well she must have read his soul!

Barnes tries to give this somewhat improbable narrative a thematic grounding. His epigraph, from an article by Paul D. MacLean in the Journal of Nervous and Mental Diseases, reads:

Man finds himself in the predicament that nature has endowed him essentially with three brains which, despite great differences in structure, must function together and communicate with one another. The oldest of these brains is basically reptilian. The second has been inherited from the lower mammals, and the third is a late mammalian development, which … has made man peculiarly man. Speaking allegorically of these brains within a brain, we might imagine that when the psychiatrist bids the patient to lie on the couch, he is asking him to stretch out alongside a horse and a crocodile.

Barnes takes this notion up at strategic moments of his story, as here, when Graham has gone to Jack for advice, and Jack, who has been reading a work of Arthur Koestler's (Barnes befriended Koestler late in that writer's life), explains why no rational solution to his problem can possibly work. Jack tells him that “the old brainbox isn't at all like we imagine. We all believe it's a big deal, our brain. We all think it's the shit-hot part of us—I mean, it stands to reason, doesn't it, that's why we aren't monkeys or foreigners. … Trouble is, there are a couple of other layers, different colours or something, don't quote me” (p. 78). And then later, again, Graham finds himself musing: “What was the latest theory which Jack—Jack of all people—had explained to him? That there were two or three different layers of the brain constantly at war with one another. This was only a different way of saying that your guts fucked you up, wasn't it?” (p. 169).

The problem with Before She Met Me is that Barnes relies too much on his theory and not enough upon the deeper psychology of disintegration. The reader is asked to make an enormous leap, from the engaging and relatively humorous recounting of Graham's growing obsession to the suddenly serious business of his breakdown. His attack on Jack and his suicide do not grow naturally from the character we have been tracking; both incidents feel macabre and distended, not unlike a simple shadow that magnifies and then breaks along wall and ceiling.

Before She Met Me is important to Barnes's oeuvre mainly because it introduces what will become a consistent theme in the work—that of appearances and their underlying realities and, secondarily, of the inevitable failure of congruence among competing worldviews. Graham's vision of things is not Jack's and it is not Ann's. Must one vision be the truth and the others deceptions, or is reality the ever shifting construct of differently constituted individuals? Graham is, in a sense, driven as much by epistemology as he is by jealousy. This theme resurfaces in Flaubert's Parrot, Talking It Over, and The Porcupine.

If Before She Met Me is fanciful in its narrative conception, the writing is quite straightforward, with Barnes striving for a fairly conventional immediacy. The opening sentence sets the stylistic pace for the rest of the novel: “The first time Graham Hendrick watched his wife commit adultery he didn't mind at all” (p. 11). How different is the beginning of the work that may well be Barnes's most beguiling to date, Flaubert's Parrot:

Six North Africans were playing boules beneath Flaubert's statue. Clean cracks sounded over the grumble of jammed traffic. With a final, ironic caress from the fingertips, a brown hand dispatched a silver globe. It landed, hopped heavily, and curved in a slow scatter of hard dust. The thrower remained a stylish, temporary statue: knees not quite unbent, and the right hand ecstatically spread.

(p. 11)

Taking the magus of the most juste as his subject and stylistic conscience, Barnes essays in this short novel a tour de force of literary collagism. The narrative, which works less as a plot, more as a force field in which Barnes situates his various perspectives, is rudimentary. Geoffrey Braithwaite, a widower and retired doctor, indulges his scholarly obsession with Gustave Flaubert. Only gradually, and very obliquely, does he realize that his story may be a kind of echo to that of Flaubert's Madame Bovary (1857), a tale that stands to the textual one as the posed boules player stands to the statue beside him. Braithwaite's deceased wife, Ellen, whom he loved a great deal, apparently had affairs; she may also have, like Emma Bovary, taken her own life. Part of Barnes's great accomplishment here is to keep these strands of Braithwaite's and Ellen's past the merest suggestions and to give the Flaubert obsession free rein.

In an important set of passages late in the book, the convergence of experience and scholarly motivation is suggested. As Braithwaite writes:

I loved Ellen, and I wanted to know the worst. … Ellen never returned this caress. She was fond of me—she would automatically agree, as if the matter weren't worth discussing, that she loved me—but she unquestioningly believed the best about me. That's the difference. She didn't ever search for that sliding panel which opens the secret chamber of the heart, the chamber where memory and corpses are kept. … That's the real distinction between people: not between those who have secrets and those who don't, but between those who want to know everything and those who don't. This search is a sign of love, I maintain.

(pp. 126–127)

Braithwaite goes on: “It's similar with books. … If you love a writer, if you depend upon the drip-feed of his intelligence, if you want to pursue him and find him—despite edicts to the contrary—then it's impossible to know too much. You seek the vice as well” (p. 127).

So, in seeking the true Flaubert, Braithwaite is, in essence, seeking the secrets of the sensibility that perhaps understood the heart of a deceiving woman. He is looking for the wound at the heart of his marriage, of his life.

But Braithwaite is in a very fundamental way divided against himself. Proclamations about his search for Ellen's secret chamber notwithstanding, he is a monumentally repressed character. His scholarship—which he thinks of as his search—is also his primary defense. Barnes's most brilliant stroke was in allowing the man's rigid and defended and obsessive sensibility to determine the structure of the book. Flaubert's Parrot is a collage because the fragmentation of some imagined unity—the true picture of Gustave Flaubert—represents the narrator's psyche.

The structure does double duty, however, for it allows Barnes to assemble a delightful and utterly idiosyncratic catalogue of Flaubertiana. The most unexpected—indeed, at times satirically unexpected—vantages are proposed. Chapter 8, for instance, is entitled “The Train-spotter's Guide to Flaubert”; it filters the whole of Flaubert's career through the highly selective mesh of his connection with railway trains. Other vantages include an official chronology, a chapter called “Louise Colet's Version,” and a bestiary chapter which assesses the writer's relation to various forms of creature life. We are never far from spirited wordplay:

Exactly what species of bear was Flaubear? We can track his spoor through the Letters. At first he is just an unspecified ours, a bear (1841). He's still unspecified—though owner of a den—in 1843, in January 1845, and in May 1845 (by now he boasts a triple layer of fur). In June 1845 he wants to buy a painting of a bear for his room and entitle it “Portrait of Gustave Flaubert”—“to indicate my moral disposition and my social temperament.” So far we (and he too, perhaps) have been imagining a dark animal: an American brown bear, a Russian black bear, a reddish bear from Savoy. But in September 1845 Gustave firmly announces himself to be “a white bear.”

(p. 52)

One of the many less overt fascinations of Flaubert's Parrot is that it applies a postmodern methodology—a fragmented study of biographical indeterminacy—to a decisively protomodern figure. That is, Flaubert labored with documented agonies to perfect a freestanding masterpiece (Madame Bovary), and for that became one of the presiding gods of the modernist enterprise, influencing Samuel Beckett, James Joyce, and countless others. That his centripetal presence should be run through Barnes's centrifuge is aesthetically dissonant in the extreme. Barnes manages the task mainly because he has such an unflinching command of irony. Braithwaite's narrative tone, the weary civilized inflections, serves his obsessive mania in a way Flaubert would have understood, perhaps finally even approved of.

As in Before She Met Me, Barnes in this novella explores the fragile constructedness of our understandings. It seems that the closer Braithwaite comes to his idol's actual world, the more he penetrates the real details—details of the sort that finally make up a life—the less certain things become. He is thrown into great confusion by the realization that the Master kept changing his description of Emma Bovary's eyes. But more upsetting still is the mystery of the eponymous parrot. Everywhere Braithwaite goes he finds yet another stuffed bird billed as the authentic model for the bird in Flaubert's celebrated story, “Un Coeur Simple” (1877; “A Simple Heart”). And when the novel ends, for all the insight our narrator has accumulated about Flaubert's life and work—and, obliquely, his own situation—he must concede that life will not gratify him with unambiguous answers. Taken to a back room where three of fifty original stuffed Amazonian parrots remain, he relents:

They gazed at me like three quizzical, sharp-eyed, dandruff-ridden, dishonourable old men. They did look—I had to admit it—a little cranky. I stared at them for a minute or so, and then dodged away.

Perhaps it was one of them.

(p. 190)

That the book's final sentence should begin with the adverb “perhaps” speaks volumes.

Flaubert's Parrot was published at just the right moment—its preoccupations were those of the intellectual culture at large. Relativism and textual instability were, of course, front-burner topics; fragmented presentation still had a whiff of the avant-garde about it; and the biographer/biographee—or scholar/subject—relationship carried a certain charge. That the volume was slim and wittily ironic could only favor its reception.

Looking past the charm and celebrity of the novel, one registers a distinct bleakness of outlook. Flaubert's Parrot is very much a late-culture offering, its pleasures built upon sad recognitions—about the failure of human connections, the insufficiency of art, and, on a formal level, about the collapse of sensible explanatory narratives. The distance that Braithwaite keeps from the emotional immediacies of life—intellectual obsession is finally a “cool” rather than “hot” engagement—comes to stand in for a larger sort of impotence. This most literate novel is also, in a sense, a damning of the literary vocation. Flaubert, the idol of all who would live by the word, is reduced in good measure to the musty artifacts and half-cocked missionaries he has left in his wake. One of the blurbs on the back of the paperback edition calls Flaubert's Parrot an “anti-novel,” a term which may have more resonances than the reviewer intended. The book can be seen as being anti the very understandings and assumptions about character and art that make the novel possible.

STARING AT THE SUN AND A HISTORY OF THE WORLD IN 10[FRAC12] CHAPTERS

In 1986, Barnes published his fourth novel, Staring at the Sun, and once again ventured such a departure from the preceding work that one could be forgiven for supposing that the author's career path grew, not from organic imperatives, but from a determination to simply veer away from the last path pursued. Where Flaubert's Parrot is arch and contrived, a mandarin tour de force, Staring at the Sun opts for a fairly straightforward presentation of a woman, Jean Sargeant, who begins her days simply enough in the early twentieth century and lives on into the beginning of the new millennium. Her life gradually gathers into extraordinariness—a quality that it owes, at least in part, to the extraordinariness of the times themselves.

Barnes here enjoys manipulating the tension between the stolid commonsensical side of his character and the presence of the marvelous, which she is also alert to. The novel is framed, at the start and finish, by what might be called visionary glimpses. In the first chapter, a roomer in Jean's childhood home tells her the story of how he got the name “Sun-Up Prosser.” He had been out on a flying mission and had, from a certain high altitude, seen the sun rise. But then:

I must have lost half my height, down to eight or nine. And then, guess what? I'd descended so quickly, you see, that it all happened all over again: this bloody great orange sun started popping up from under the horizon. Couldn't believe my eyes. All over again. Like running a film back and having another look at it.

(p. 28)

The imagery of flight and, no less important, its detached perspectives govern this most curious novel. Barnes's “aerial” premise would seem to be to present the passage of a century—more—through the medium of the life of a middle-class woman. The close-up scenes are rendered with a conspicuous lack of affect, possibly to encourage the distancing. Here, for example, the author portrays Jean's short-lived involvement in a sexual relationship with her son's girlfriend, Rachel: “Twice more they tried, if try was the word: Jean lay turned away on her side, wearing a borrowed nightdress, holding her breath. She wanted to want to—but the actual achievement of wanting seemed inaccessible. When it seemed that Rachel was asleep, Jean relaxed; she was also struck by how well she then slept” (p. 128).

Barnes's point here is not to shock, but rather to suggest that in her utterly matter-of-fact way Jean is an explorer, what the writer Robert Musil called a “possibilitarian”—one who researches the options of life with an experimental interest. If this scene seems distanced, though, we need only look at the extraordinary telescoping of decades that Barnes indulges in later in the novel:

Jean had often wondered what it would be like to grow old. When she had been in her fifties, and still feeling in her thirties, she heard a talk on the radio by a gerontologist. “Put cotton wool in your ears,” he had said, “and pebbles in your shoes.” …

At sixty she had still felt like a young woman; at eighty she felt like a middle-aged woman who had something a bit wrong with her; at nearly a hundred she no longer bothered to think whether or not she felt younger than she was—there didn't seem any point.

(p. 141)

Jean is presented throughout in just this way. We know her as she is refracted to us through the author's omniscience, as he reports on her patient efforts to fathom herself.

The novel ends many decades after Jean's first conversation with Sun-Up Prosser, with Jean, like Sun-Up Prosser himself, in an airplane, only instead of seeing the sun rise twice, she gets to see its second setting. Barnes has hit upon a wonderful figure, a kind of double illusion that yet partakes of resonance. Not only does the sun not rise or set twice, it does not, finally, rise or set at all. Yet the human determination to see against the facts—to keep the earth at the center of the picture—is decisive for our experience here below. Barnes seems to suggest that even after the passing of nearly a hundred years in this most remarkable era of science and technology, we are refusing to be dethroned—indeed, we are insisting on our dose of wonder:

After several minutes the pilot flattened out and began a second southward run. Jean turned away … and looked out the window. … The sun's descent seemed quicker this time, a smooth slipping away. The earth did not greedily chase it, but lay flatly back with its mouth open. The big orange sun settled on the horizon, yielded a quarter of its volume to the accepting earth, then a half, then three-quarters, and then, easily, without argument, the final quarter. For some minutes a glow continued from beneath the horizon, and Jean did, at last, smile towards this postmortal phosphoresence. Then the aeroplane turned away, and they began to lose height.

(pp. 196–197)

We think, perhaps, of the final passage of Barnes's Metroland, which similarly depicts a loss of light, a glow, and then a more final turn away. There is no question that we are in the hands of a clever and coordinated stylist. Unfortunately, Staring at the Sun does not bring Jean Sargeant persuasively to life—her myriad encounters and conflicts and accommodations feel like paper events. The woman has emerged from her creator's brain. She is thought forth, but in no sense is she full-blooded. And while the beauties of some of Barnes's set pieces—not least his fabulous sunrises and sunsets—stay with the reader, their ostensible pretext, Jean Sargeant, does not.

Barnes's next novel, A History of the World in 10[frac12] Chapters, is often cited by critics as his most ambitious achievement. And if the measure of ambition is seen as being how much heterogeneous material can be brought together between a set of covers, then these critics are right. For here is a “novel” that wants to be all things: epic in scope, mythic in reference, comic in execution, tragic in implication, and compendious in realization. Barnes has selected diverse images and thematic elements and around these has conjured a set of narratives that could not possibly be more different from one another. The ten and a half chapters (the “1/2” is really a “parenthesis,” an essay on marital love) tell as many different stories; they are linked mainly by a recurrence of boats and aquatic settings. Thus, the first tale is a reimagining of the biblical tale of Noah's ark; the fourth is a narrative of a woman adrift in the South Pacific in the days after a nuclear holocaust; the fifth attempts to tell the story behind Théodore Géricault's famous painting The Raft of the Medusa (1818–1819); and so on.

A charitable response to A History of the World would be to say that it recalls Giovanni Boccaccio, or Italo Calvino's If on a Winter's Night a Traveller (1979), or John Barth's modern Arabian Nights fantasias. But the sprawl of disconnected episodes and reflections lacks the frame support of those works. Boccaccio had the plague in the background, Calvino his playful assumption about the function of suspense in reading, and Barth generally pits his storytelling divagations against a prevailing contemporary situation. But Barnes gives his reader precious little. An author who imagines that recurring appearances of a woodworm or a deathwatch beetle—or one of a dozen other peripheral elements—are sufficient linkage in the construction of a novel is like a dinner host who assumes that a few bowls of mixed nuts will carry his guests through the long cocktail hour.

This is not to say that there is not abundant cleverness or that there are not many moments of stylistic triumph. The “Shipwreck” chapter, which tells the story behind the Géricault painting, is at once precise and attuned to indeterminacies and the pitfalls of relativism. It stands, both in conception and execution, with the very best of Barnes's work. Here, for example, the author reflects upon a few specific ways in which the painting differs from the documentation given by two survivors of the actual wreck:

The ignorant eye yields, with a certain testy reluctance, to the informed eye. Let's check “Scene of Shipwreck” [Géricault's original catalog title] against Savigny and Corréard's narrative. It's clear at once that Géricault hasn't painted the hailing that led to the final rescue: that happened differently, with the brig suddenly close upon the raft and everyone rejoicing. No, this is the first sighting, when the Argus appeared on the horizon for a tantalizing half hour. Comparing paint with print, we notice at once that Géricault has not represented the survivor up the mast holding straightened-out barrel-hoops with handkerchiefs attached to them. He has opted instead for a man being held up on top of a barrel and waving a large cloth. We pause over this change, then acknowledge its advantage: reality offered him a monkey-up-a-stick image; art suggested a solider focus and an extra vertical.

(pp. 130–131)

The reader encounters a chatty pedantry of tone, not unlike the tone adopted from time to time by Braithwaite in Flaubert's Parrot. This is Barnes's favored idiom—precise, knowing, verging on irony. Indeed, reading the Géricault chapter we wonder at times whether the whole business is not a send-up. But if it is, then we have to ask, to what end?

While we read A History of the World in 10[frac12] Chapters, watching Barnes move from one sort of pastiche to another, this same question of purpose keeps rearing up. The Géricault prose is at least arresting in terms of its perspectives and detail, but much of the rest of the book is in a very different idiom—a kind of faux comic writing that is finally neither comic nor particularly expressive. Barnes's account of Noah and his animals—the base narrative—suffers in the extreme from this ill-judged presentation:

I gather that one of your early Hebrew legends asserts that Noah discovered the principle of intoxication by watching a goat get drunk on fermented grapes. What a brazen attempt to shift responsibility onto the animals; and all, sadly, part of a pattern. The Fall was the serpent's fault, the honest raven was a slacker and a glutton, the goat turned Noah into an alkie. Listen: you can take it from me that Noah didn't need any cloven-footed knowledge to help crack the secret of the vine.

(p. 29)

Barnes goes on in this vein at great length, pushing willfully in the face of his greatest writerly gifts—his elegant concision and linguistic brio. The quip about Noah turning into an “alkie” is neither funny nor interesting, and there are too many other such lapses in these pages.

A History of the World in 10[frac12] Chapters is finally a book without a significant point. Barnes is clearly playing a variation on the postmodern collagism he used so effectively in Flaubert's Parrot. But where that novel had a binding energy at its core—a repressed psyche in extremis—this novel has no agenda except possibly that of showing what a literate and thoughtful stylist can do with a cooked-up premise and a bag full of archetypal tales.

TALKING IT OVER

If A History of the World in 10[frac12] Chapters is the more centrifugal of Barnes's novels, then Talking It Over is one of his most formally balanced and restrained. Taking as its epigraph a pungently paradoxical saying—“He lies like an eye-witness”—Barnes directs the full beam of his attention upon the romantic/sexual triangle that so clearly compels his narrative imagination. This terse, sophisticated work uses the voices of its three principals—Stuart, Oliver, and Gillian—to tell what is hardly a new tale in the repertoire. Stuart and Oliver are friends. Stuart, the shy and bumbling businessman, meets and marries Gillian. Oliver, smooth and impetuous, falls in love with Gillian at the wedding and promptly begins to lay siege. It is giving nothing away to reveal that he finally succeeds in winning her—indeed, marrying her himself—but that no one finds lasting happiness from the shift of the arrangement.

Talking It Over rides on the verve of its three voices and on the comic possibilities of the staple psychological premise, which is, in effect, that Stuart not only cedes Gillian to Oliver, but that he acquires the emotional power and simplicity of the devastated, while Oliver, initially blessed with a kind of dark complexity and purpose, fades in fearful ineptitude.

At first it is Oliver who captures the reader. His amatory scheming powers the narrative. Studying Gillian at the wedding, for instance, he is very much the poet:

She was all pale green and chestnut, with an emerald blaze at her throat; I roamed her face, from the bursting curve of her forehead to the plum-dent of her chin; her cheeks, so often pallid, were brushed with the pink of a Tiepolo dawn, though whether the brush was external and garaged in her handbag or internal and wielded by ecstasy, I was unable or unwilling to guess; her mouth was besieged by a half-smile which seemed to last and last; her eyes were her lustrous dowry. I roamed her face, do you hear?

(p. 62)

This is obsessive aestheticism à la Nabokov, and Barnes sustains it without apparent exertion. To get a sense of Barnes's comfortable range, one need only compare Oliver's words with a passage in the voice of his former friend and now-embittered rival, Stuart:

People find me more interesting now I've got more money. I don't know if I am—I'm probably not—but they find me so. That's a consolation. I like buying things and owning things and throwing them away if I don't like them. I bought a toaster the other day and after a week I didn't like the way it looked so I chucked it out.

(p. 233)

And Gillian? Plausible as she is as the object of Stuart's and Oliver's devotions, she does not possess the distinctness of presence the men do. Almost out of structural necessity, she is engagingly neutral—which is to say alert, observant, and articulate, but somehow lacking the tormented will of either Stuart or Oliver. There is a detachment, a sobriety, in Gillian's tone:

The only bit of the village which attracts visitors is the medieval frieze on the west end of the church. It runs all the way along the outside wall, doing a curve over the door in the middle. There are about thirty-six carved stone heads, alternating in design. Half of them are angels' heads, the other half skulls with a neat pair of crossed bones beneath. Paradise, hell, paradise, hell, paradise, hell, they go. Or perhaps it's resurrection and death, resurrection and death, resurrection and death, clatter, clatter like the railway that passes. Except that we don't believe in hell and resurrection any more.

(p. 243)

Like so many of Barnes's other works, Talking It Over is a study in the limitations of private subjectivity and in the invariably different construction placed on all situations by the various participants—hence the epigraph. By rotating the basic narrative steadily through three very different fields of consciousness, Barnes ensures that we find no absolute purchase. Every plausible interpretation, it seems, is undermined by the next speaker's version of things.

Where Barnes reveals his higher artistic sensibility is in the details. Not content merely to work through the premises of relativism, he unfolds subtler glimpses along the way. A case in point would be Oliver's speculation on Gillian's profession, which is the cleaning and restoring of old paintings:

And I've discovered this really tasty metaphor. Fashions in the universe of picture restoration—I speak from recent but devoted authority—tend to change. One moment it's out with the Brillo pad and scour, scour, scour. Another moment it's retouch with a decorator's brush, load every rift with pigment, and so on. … This means (you don't mind if I simplify matters a tad?) that the restorer should at all times do only what she knows may be undoable later by others. She must appreciate that her certainties are only temporary, her finalities provisional. … What does the restorer do first? She uses an isolating varnish to ensure that the paint she applies can be removed without trouble at some later date. … This is what we understand by reversibility.

(p. 126)

As this passage shows, Barnes has the novelist's gift of not merely presenting a character, but of inhabiting him. Oliver's perspective, his sense of things, is captured at the level of his language. These are his words, his terms; this is how he thinks. And by achieving this re-creation with three different characters—all first-person—Barnes ensures that the reader will experience the dramatic complications at more than just the intellectual level.

It is not hard to see how Oliver's discovered “metaphor” connects with certain of Braithwaite's preoccupations in Flaubert's Parrot or the discussion of Géricault's painting in A History of the World. Nor is it out of place, finally, to connect this admittedly concrete imagining with the overarching interrogation carried out in Barnes's next novel, The Porcupine. Here, too, reversibility is at issue. Only now it is not the aesthetic rendition of events but their historical interpretation in the light of changing ideologies.

THE PORCUPINE AND LETTERS FROM LONDON

The Porcupine is, in a way, Barnes's updating of Arthur Koestler's novel about the Moscow show trials, Darkness at Noon (1940). The confinements, the interrogations, the anguished soul-searching are all there. It is a novel so bereft of setting that the reader begins to believe that the material world has fallen away and left nothing but voices, ideologies, ancient rancors, and here and there the glimmers of political idealism. Peter Solinsky, the son of a party intellectual in an unnamed Eastern European country, is appointed to prosecute the former president, Stoyo Petkanov. His mandate is to scapegoat the former leader, to put on trial the excesses and failures of the old regime.

As the novel begins, Solinsky is cocky with the supposition that history is now on his side. But he does not expect the psychological wiliness of the old leader, who knows the realities of politics well enough to know that there is no ultimately defensible moral high ground and that past events can support any construction placed upon them. Petkanov does not deliver himself over—indeed, he can be said to outfox his younger opponent at every turn. In such a way, moreover, the reader is led to root for the supposedly discredited version of things.

Barnes's twist, then, is to undermine Solinsky morally even as he is trying to do the same for Petkanov. Solinsky's bright-boy zealousness quickly crumbles, and in its place is disclosed an emasculated lack of center. Here, in a crucial scene, Solinsky's wife, Maria, tells him that her feelings for him have changed:

“… I can't love you any more, and after today I doubt that I can even respect you.” Peter did not respond, did not even turn to see her face. “Still, others will respect you more and, who knows, perhaps others will love you …”

“The man was a tyrant, a murderer, a thief, a liar, an embezzler, a moral pervert, the worst criminal in our nation's history. Everyone knows it. My God, even you are beginning to suspect it.”

“If that's the case,” she replied, “it shouldn't have been difficult to prove without whoring for television and inventing fake evidence.”

(p. 112)

The charge that can be leveled against The Porcupine is that Barnes is too facile about playing against expectation: having established that evil is more complex and interesting than well-intentioned righteousness, he should have reversed the reverse. That he did not do so is, of course, to suggest that the new order has its own besetting flaws—relativism, shallow expediency, and a kind of unearned moral smugness—but in the scenario as presented, there is no deeper sense of context, and no deeper condemnation of the genuine evils perpetrated by Petkanov's regime.

After The Porcupine, Barnes published Letters from London, a collection of journalistic essays written over several years for the New Yorker. These are mainly topical, interpreting English politics for American readers, reflecting on political-cultural issues, like the fatwa against Barnes's close friend Salman Rushdie. In his preface, Barnes recognizes a certain temper to the times he has been commenting upon, asking:

Was there, in the first half of the nineties, a tiredness and repetition to public life, a sense of things unraveling? It seemed to be the case. And if so, there are pleasures as well as despondencies to be had: Flaubert said that his favorite historical periods were those which were ending, because this meant that something new was being born.

(p. xi)

That “something new” could be, for Barnes and many of his contemporaries, the return to power of the Labour Party in the person of Tony Blair. But his final sentences in the last essay of the collection, “Left, Right, Left, Right: The Arrival of Tony Blair,” certainly caution against any excessive optimism: “He may very well be the British Prime Minister as the century turns. But millenarians would be premature in renting space on mountaintops” (p. 311).

Barnes is a superb practitioner of thoughtful, opinionated, and irony-leavened journalism. Indeed, while his sardonic humor leaks through here and there in the novels, particularly the marital shooting matches, the free-ranging topical article offers a swifter and more diverse procession of targets. Here is a coolly acute reflection on a photograph of Margaret Thatcher's first cabinet:

Twenty-four men, plus one central woman, lined up beneath the dewdrop chandelier, Axminster at their feet, Gainsborough behind them. Twenty-four men trying, variously, to exude gravitas, to look youthfully dynamic, to dissemble serious surprise at being there in the first place. Ten of the two dozen are faced with the first real problem of political office: what to do with your hands when sitting in the front row of an official photograph. Folding your arms, like Keith Joseph, looks a defensive, prim, keep-off gesture. Clasping your hands over your capacious stomach, like Lord Hailsham, looks the boast of a gourmandizer. Grasping the left wrist with the right hand and allowing the left hand to dangle on the thigh, like Lord Carrington, seems indecisive, semiwet.

(p. 41)

What strikes the American reader about Barnes's essays is his supple use of irony—for irony has many modes and inflections—and the effect, both immediate and cumulative, of a civilized voice speaking out on matters of presumed public interest. There is no real counterpart in American journalism. Barnes's incisive and wide-ranging prose—his critical precision and his humor—is a much-needed reminder of what intellectual registers one loses by living in a mass culture.

CROSS CHANNEL

Between his many novels and his highly visible reportage, Barnes has established himself as a writer of international stature—too elusive and publicly clever to be seen as a pundit, but certainly to be heeded both as artist and opinion maker. Never one for public display—he does not hunt real or metaphorical lions—Barnes seems to follow Flaubert's advice, living like a bourgeois the better to vent himself in his work.

In the late 1990s the author lived in a house in North London with his wife and literary agent, Patricia Kavanagh. He moved in literary circles, counting writers Ian McEwan, Kazuo Ishiguro, and Salman Rushdie as close friends. (A long-standing friendship with Martin Amis was, reportedly, ruptured when Amis left Kavanagh for another agent.) Barnes and his wife gardened and entertained with notorious style. Barnes followed various sports with uncharacteristically unbuttoned enthusiasm.

But these details tell us little about a most enigmatic man. The writer Mira Stout, in a 1992 profile of Barnes, quotes Martin Amis as saying: “There has always been an inscrutability about him, even to his best friends. The rest of us are a bunch of cheerful blabbermouths compared to him. He was always more discreet, more grown up. … He takes longer to get to know than most people, but he sort of looms up on you as a friend” (p. 72). And then, of course, he writes—writes prodigiously.

In 1996, Barnes published his first collection of stories, Cross Channel, and if we are searching for tendencies and directions, this book might represent the author's movement from more stylish to more substantial approaches to subject matter. Barnes has taken the complex oppositions of England and France as his subtle linking element, with each story in some way refracting their historical destiny as neighbors. The stories range over several centuries and are presented not chronologically but in thematic sequences. Thus, the collection opens with “Interference,” a tale about a self-exiled English composer living in the French countryside at the beginning of the twentieth century, and ends with the formerly futuristic “Tunnel,” in which an elderly writer travels via tunnel-train from England to Paris and uses the occasion to sift through the memories of a long lifetime. The large-scale sense of a rupture healed can be found in myriad local forms throughout the book, as can the theme of memory as a process of reconciliation.

At the center of Cross Channel are two powerfully realized stories about the persistence of the past in the present. “Melon” shows how a single event—a nonevent, in fact—can become the axis of association and longing in a life, while “Evermore” tells the tale of a woman who makes an annual pilgrimage to her brother's grave at Cabaret Rouge, France. This latter story, in particular, seems unafraid of its emotional charge and marks a change of presentation for Barnes, who until Cross Channel had always raised the decorated screen of articulate irony. The story ends with a powerful passage, a moment of elegiac anticipation that irradiates the collection. The woman, Miss Moss, imagines the day when her mourning ritual will cease. She then finds that

even as she pronounced herself an antique, her memories seemed to sharpen. If this happened to the individual, could it not also happen on a national scale? Might there not be, at some point in the first decades of the twenty-first century, one final moment, lit by evening sun, before the whole thing was handed over to the archivists? Might there not be a great looking back down the mown grass of the decades, might not a gap in the trees discover the curving ranks of slender headstones, white tablets holding up to the eye their bright names and terrifying dates, their harps and springboks, maple leaves and ferns, their Christian crosses and their Stars of David? Then, in the space of a wet blink, the gap in the trees would close and the mown grass disappear, a violet indigo cloud would cover the sun, and history, gross history, daily history, would forget. Is this how it would be?

(p. 111, 1996 ed.)

The passage resonates in “Tunnel,” in which the gathering force of memory is again unleashed upon the sprawl of history—personal and collective.

As Metroland, Barnes's first literary novel, featured in Chris Lloyd a protagonist just his age, “Tunnel” has as its protagonist a writer likewise born in 1946. Now, of course, he is projectively aged. But he has not lost his fierce edge, and he still finds in France, and in things French a counterpoint sensibility, one he seems to require. As Barnes now explains:

As for sentimentality, that was sometimes the charge against him for his view of the French. If accused, he would always plead guilty, claiming in mitigation that this is what countries are for. It was unhealthy to be idealistic about your own country, since the least clarity of vision led swiftly to disenchantment. Other countries therefore existed to supply the idealism: they were a version of pastoral.

(p. 207, 1996 ed.)

After seven novels, a book of essays, and a collection of stories, Barnes appeared strong enough to relinquish some of his irony and stylistic consciousness and to follow the threads he has laid out in dazzling abundance.

Note

1. Except where noted, page references to Barnes's books are made to the paperback editions published by Vintage Books (Random House).

Selected Bibliography

I. novels. Metroland (London and New York, 1980); Before She Met Me (London, 1982; New York, 1986); Flaubert's Parrot (London, 1984; New York, 1985); Staring at the Sun (London, 1986; New York, 1987); A History of the World in 10[frac12] Chapters (London and New York, 1989); Talking It Over (London and New York, 1991); The Porcupine (London and New York, 1992).

Crime novels under the name Dan Kavanagh. Duffy (London and New York, 1980); Fiddle City (London and New York, 1981); Putting the Boot In (London and New York, 1985); Going to the Dogs (London and New York, 1987).

II. short stories. Cross Channel: Stories (London and New York, 1996).

III. essays. Letters from London (London and New York, 1995).

IV. critical studies. Tom Paulin, “National Myths,” in Encounter (June 1980); David Coward, “The Rare Creature's Human Sounds,” in Times Literary Supplement (London) (5 October 1984); Wendy Lesser, “Bloated and Shrunken Worlds,” in Hudson Review (Autumn 1985); Terrence Rafferty, “Watching the Detectives,” in Nation (6–13 July 1985); Richard Locke, “Flood of Forms,” in New Republic (4 December 1989); Mira Stout, “Chameleon Novelist,” in New York Times Magazine (22 November 1992); Michael Scammel, “Trial and Error,” in New Republic (4 and 11 January 1993); Ian Buruma, Review of Letters from London in New York Review of Books (21 March 1996); James Wood, Review of Cross Channel, in New Republic (24 June 1996).