Departures

By


Apart from The Departures, I have ten other Julian Barnes’ novels on my bookshelf and have previously posted about The Noise of Time (2016) and Elizabeth Finch (2022). There’s only a few of his novels I don’t have but I am sure I read these along the way – library copies or copies leant to a friend. My first memory of reading Barnes was A History of the World in 10 ½ Chapters, at the time of its release in 1989, when I was an intellectual slip of a thing. I loved the imaginative premise of the novel, its sweep, and its metafictional half chapter. So, Barnes has present throughout my adult reading life. The retirement of both Peter Carey and Julian Barnes from the world of fiction seems as close as a well-respected work colleague, a teacher – for example – so much a part of the school you can’t imagine the place without them.

Barnes makes his own departure the theme of this auto-fictional work. Human memory is the immediate theme, with the introduction of the literary idea of ‘involuntary memory (IAM)’ and the Proust-like condition in which, following a stroke, a man tasting apple pie triggered ‘memories of all the apple pies he had tasted’ (p. 4). This leads on to several pages of speculation and self-questioning, until Barnes returns (in a way) to the metafictional style of his much earlier novel with two startling ideas that are ‘mentioned at this stage’:

1)      There will be a story – or a story within a story – but not just yet; and
2)      This will be my last book (p. 9).

The Proustian recollections continue for another ten pages, until – as promised – we enter the second layer of the narrative. Chapter 2 is entitled ‘The Beginning of the Story’ and the story is very Julian Barnes-like. It has been years since I read Talking It Over, but the premise of the novel was a love triangle involving Stuart (shy) and Oliver (brash) and Gillian (game).  Now Barnes tells us a ‘true story’ along similar lines, though with the usual caveat that names have been changed and another admission in a deliberate gap of time. The story will involve a love triangle from youth and the return of the same characters forty years later, older but not necessarily wiser in love.

Barnes’ own medical history is similarly treated with both literary detachment and intimacy. He has been diagnosed with a blood cancer, not a death sentence but a ‘life sentence: sentenced to live with [his] cancer’ until he dies (pp. 48-49). Having described his situation in such terms, Barnes interrupts his narrative with a list of six things he had neglected in his retelling, followed by a summary of entries into an ‘archly self-pitying’ notebook entitled ‘Jules Was’. Among the interesting notes is one that describes how writing helps in times of personal crisis. 

      Writing this – at the time of writing – makes me calm. The concentration on words, on getting it as true as I can. This was the same when Pat [my wife] was dying. Terror and anguish were kept away by writing about terror and anguish, which came when I was not writing’ (p. 54).

Later in the novel (if it is a novel) Barnes writes that ‘The Departure which will be followed by no Arrival may come suddenly, with no time for thought’ (p. 129). Once again, literary speculations follow until in the last few pages, Barnes directly addresses the reader. This reader. ‘I shall “miss” “you” – whatever that means … I hope you’ve enjoyed our relationship over the years. I certainly have …’ (pp. 157-158).

These are potentially morbid and maudlin themes, but as Alex Clark notes, Barnes tells the story with bathetic humour (The Guardian, January 2026). Dinah Birch characterises Departure(s) as a ‘polygonal book’, a hybrid of fiction, memory and philosophy (Times Literary Supplement, January 2026). Whether it is better for a writer to depart mid-sentence, like Dickens, or retire like Barnes, allowing ‘time for thought’, is a matter of opinion. As in life, I’d favour writing on into the sunset, but I can certainty understand that whether through illness or old age,  some writers simply know when they have written their last novel, since ‘Ripeness is all’ (as Barnes himself quotes before inevitably a parenthetic note about another IAM).

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Wood Green

By
Image
Novels and films that explore the relationship between a young, would-be writer, and a more experienced writer-mentor are not necessarily new but Sean Rabin’s Wood Green has done something a little different with this ‘genre’. The idea seems to appeal: think of the success of Joël Dicker’s The Truth about the Harry Quebert Affair – a murder mystery of sorts, with a younger writer living with and assisting his mentor. Then there is the very engaging thriller – John Colapinto’s About the Author, which is not so much about the mentor but the idea of literary theft as a shortcut to success. Sean Rabin plays around with some of these ideas, as young Michael arrives in Hobart to assist Lucian Clarke put together his papers (for posterity, or for some biographical project, yet to be determined). At several points, Michael, who has completed a PhD on Clarke, considers how he might either make use of Lucian’s papers for his own purposes, or else appropriate Lucian’s incomplete manuscript as...
Read more

Chinese Postman

By
Image
 I first came across Brian Castro’s fiction in the 1990s, with the intriguing Double Wolf (1991). A long time passed and I rediscovered his writing, reading The Garden Book (2005), The Bath Fugues (2009) and Street to Street (2012) within a few years. Finally, I met Brian in person in 2018 at an artist retreat run by the J.M. Coetzee Centre for Creative Practice. His presentation was entirely about Coetzee -- he struck me as a modest and friendly man -- but there was a moment around a campfire where writers shared their work, and Brian was a sympathetic and encouraging listener.  Chinese Postman opens with short paragraphs that move between third person and first-person narrative, as the narrator calls attention to a ‘bitter and twisted man’ who ‘sees nothing but fragments’ (p. 1).  He is a lonely, enduring the killing zone as his friends pass away, with a neighbour and dogs for company. Soon we are told that ‘He talks mainly to himself. Clears his throat often’ (an ...
Read more

The Plains

By
Image
  The Plains was once described by Ben Lerner as a ‘strange Australian masterpiece’, a novel that ‘can feel less like something you’ve read than something you’ve dreamed’ ( The New Yorker, 29 March 2017).While Gerald Murnane locates the story in the Australian continent, its mythic qualities are such that Lerner recognises the expansive grasslands and unobstructed sky of the Great Plains of North America.   Wayne MacCauley also makes the case for a wider reading in his introduction to the 2012 Text Publishing edition to Murnane’s 1982 novel, placing it figuratively in ‘the library of alternative Australian fiction’ (vii), a reading experience he compares to ‘anything proposed by Swift, Kafka, Borges or Calvino’ (ix). Indeed, these are appropriate references. From Swift and Calvino, the sense of allegory and fable; from Kafka, the alternative world, dream-like but here more faintly oppressive; from Borges, the labyrinth library of poets, artists and writers endlessly specia...
Read more