Elizabeth Finch

 

I’ve been reading Julian Barnes all my adult life and it would take a lot for me to express disappointment in one of his novels. Professional reviewers aren’t paid to be as loyal or generous. Sam Byers describes the novel as dealing in evasion: ‘vagueness layered on vagueness’ (The Guardian, 14 April 2022). Helen Elliott uses the phrase ‘exasperated sign’ in her heading and concludes that Barnes is out of touch: ‘In 2022 sincerity and authenticity are rumbling irony as the preferred mode for many highly literate readers and writers’ (Sydney Morning Herald, 7 April 2022).

I might confess that a novel that deals with ambiguity and irony would be more likely to appeal to me as a reader than to make me sigh, and although I did wonder about whether there was enough meat on the bones, I still enjoyed the delicate little meal that it was.

In Part One we meet Neil, our narrator, and Elizabeth Finch, a dynamic History lecturer – as well as Neil’s immediate companions, conservative Geoff, sensitive Linda, and daring Dutch Anna. Finch provides an immediate orbit for the characters because she challenges their thinking by demonstrating a Stoic view of History and present culture in her interactions with the class. Finch becomes an object of fascination, particularly for Neil, whose life seems to have been shaped by youthful interactions and a retrospective (mental) dialogue with her. Here’s an example,

We tend to associate romanticism with optimism, don’t we? She, I think, was a romantic pessimist.

Here’s another thing: the dead can’t tell you that you are wrong. Only the living can do that – and they may be lying. So I trust the dead more. Is that bizarre, or is it sensible?

And further to this: why should we expect our collective memory – which we call history – to be any less fallible than our own personal memory? (pp. 21-22).

In life we do meet people whose presence stays with us, and in a novel, the half-formed thoughts can be developed and made significant in ways that go beyond life (or at least, beyond my own capacity for empathy that merges with nostalgia). Finch dies, and Neil’s occasional lunches with his teacher must have held significance for her, too, as she gifts Neil her papers, library, and diaries (p. 45). Neil confesses that one of his children once dubbed him ‘the King of Unfinished Projects’ (p. 52) and what follows in Part 2 is an example of this. Finch has been writing or at least thinking about Julian the Apostate, a Roman Emperor who turned against the ‘Pale Galilean’ and created a schism in history once defeated on the field. Fifty pages of part-history, part-philosophical speculation follow (I, for one, didn’t mind). In Part Three, essay done (‘Of course, I showed it to nobody’ [p. 125]) Neil positions himself as Finch’s biographer (which of course he is, in the novelistic sense). He investigates different claims from his teacher or claims about her. (Was she Jewish? She’d certainly implied so. Did she have a great love with a man in a double-breasted coat. If so, who was he?). Then he visits Anna and discovers that Linda was once in love with him (I had to turn the pages back to Part One to remember Linda). Anna implies he has been blind to aspects of Finch’s character, too, as a man whose eyes are only half open (as a man, perhaps, without a woman’s knowledge of another woman).

Elizabeth Finch concludes with the trick of a metafictional short story, as Neil imagines others finding his own papers at the time of his death – a ‘typescript back in the desk’ where it might be contemplated and then returned to ‘a different drawer in a different desk, its fate up to someone not yet born’. The last line, which must have irritated the two reviewers quoted earlier is simply this: ‘And any ironic laugher you hear will be mine’ (p. 179). Mine, too: Barnes’ speculations on an influential teacher might well be a neglected manuscript in another writer’s hands, but he is the public figure Finch is not, and a project-finisher in a way Neil can only dream. I think there’s sincerity and authenticity in Barnes’ portrait of a pair of romantic pessimists (Finch, and Neil). The failure of the plot is the failure of a life only half-lived – the quiet desperation of someone scratching in the dirt for a purpose they haven’t found, only guessed at. To be vague is to be human, to forgive vagueness is divine.