Julian Barnes’s latest book comprises five micro-essays, originally commissioned for a radio series a decade ago and repackaged here. The publisher spies an opportunity, perhaps, for something like a manifesto on open-mindedness, with Barnes’s musings the vehicle. Not unreasonable: as the author of 14 novels, winner of the Booker, he knows a thing or two about the power of language: “I believe deeply in words, in their ability to represent thought, define truth, and create beauty. I’m equally aware that words are constantly used for the opposite purposes: to obfuscate truth, misrepresent thought, lie, slander, and provoke hatred.”
It follows from this recognition that a clever person ought to be able to rethink old convictions in light of new evidence and life experience – to see one’s misperceptions for what they are and change one’s mind. Call it the virtue of the volte-face. But the broadcast conceit doesn’t translate well on the page, leaving the author exposed. In a chapter extolling the benefits of rereading, he tells us that after a lifetime of despising EM Forster’s prissiness, he eventually came around to him. Belatedly, a subversive and “delightfully unpatriotic” writer was discovered. Forster was funny to boot. Barnes quotes a line from Where Angels Fear to Tread as evidence: “‘Everyone to his taste!’ said Harriet, who always delivered a platitude as if it was an epigram.” But he opens himself up to the same charge with phrases such as: “what a grown-up novelist Forster is”. Or again: “The pleasure of being proved wrong can be a genuine pleasure.”
