Knopf
Review by Walter Cummins
A significant pleasure of reading one of Julian Barnes many books is enjoying his verbal inventiveness and appreciating the workings of his mind. His deeper concerns often emerge his fiction but are the overt subjects of his nonfiction. Both genres tend to be driven by similar questions. His latest book—which he claims to be his last—Departure(s) may be considered a hybrid. Designated as a novel, it’s much more devoted to his musings about age, illness, dying, memory, and our connection to our pasts. Yet it may be a novel in disguise, all the thoughts serving as grounding for the sections that tell a human story that can be considered the plot.
That story, the told through the memories of Barnes as a narrator who knew an on and off couple at two stages of their lives, explores the relationship of Jean and Stephen in episodes forty years apart. This Barnes knew them well when he was a third at many of their meetings when they were students at Oxford. Then they drifted apart with few random connections for the next forty years. But after a chance encounter, Barnes brings them together and once again becomes their confidant.
At this point I don’t know if Jean and Stephen were real people or characters based on real people or just creations of Barnes’ imagination. I suppose the Internet would answer that question, but I don’t want to know yet. [Note: I gave in and searched, only to learn that Barnes won’t say, leaving the uncertainty to his biographer.] A related question is whether the Barnes who knew them and influenced their lives is truly the author Julian Barnes. With all of the verifiable information contained in the book, it would seem he is being autobiographical. But he’s a very ingenious writer, perhaps amusing himself with the uncertainty of what’s fact and what’s fiction. Barnes even admits it: “But it would be foolish to deduce that these detailed annotations of life amount to what actually happened.”
The story of people separated by decades is another version of the situation at the heart of his 2011 Booker Prize winning novel, The Sense of an Ending, whose title is a deliberate repeat of that of Frank Kermode’s seminal 1965 work that denies the common human assumption that our lives are developing stories culminating in a fulfilling climax. In fact, Kermode argues, we only live in the “middest”—essentially an ongoing redundant present, not advancing toward any goal. Barnes’ 2011 novel also addresses events that took place forty years apart. In that novel, the protagonist, Toby devotes his later present to understanding memories that have puzzled him for decades, but he never transcends his experiences in the middest. In this 2026 book, do Jean and Stephen get anywhere before their deaths that freed Barnes to violate his promise not to write about them? Has Barnes, despite his many books and prizes, gotten anywhere? He imagines himself as an old geezer rushed to the hospital for end-of-life care and wearing a label badge that reads, in all caps, But I Won a Booker.
The ending he believes in is death rather than fulfillment. A section of this book details Barnes’ medical diagnoses, including a manageable rare blood cancer. Death has been on his mind for some time, explored at length in his 2008 Nothing To Be Frightened Of.
Death is one form of departure, which this book’s title suggests is plural as Barnes refers to many already departed in addition to Jean and Stephen—his wife, friends like Martin Amis and Christopher Hitchens, and many others who can be summed as the departed.
Assuming that Jean and Stephen are actual people, the question still remains whether Barnes has described and understood them accurately. He does offer the details of many private and confessional conversations. He gives his analysis of the truths of their relationships. A novelist is free to do that with his creations, even if they started as flesh and blood. Even if he tries to avoid tampering with what happened, he still is relying on his memory.
The narrator Barnes admits his fallibility: “I thought I knew what made people tick; I even thought of myself as an advice centre. But I had treated Stephen and Jean as if they were characters in one of my novels, believing I could gently direct them towards the ends which I desired. I’d been confusing life with fiction.”
The opening section of the book presents a consideration of memory, centered on Proust’s madeleine and all that it stimulated related to other theories of memory. With this opening focus, could it be that Departure(s) with the embedded tale of Jean and Stephen is an examination of memory as exemplified by one man, Julian Barnes, as he shares details of both his past and recent life? Even if he was trying to be completely factual was he doomed to failure, creating a story of what he thinks happened as all of us do?
