Julian Barnes has always enjoyed blurring the boundaries between fiction and nonfiction, writing novels that sound like works of history or criticism. His new novel, riddling to the point of reader-denying, devotes a third of its short length to a 50-page essay on historical views of the Roman emperor Julian the Apostate, who was thwarted in his attempt to ditch Christianity and return Rome to pagan worship.
The essay’s author is the book’s narrator, Neil, a twice-divorced soap actor turned mushroom grower, who writes in memory of Elizabeth Finch, a lecturer who taught a year-long evening class he attended in London on the subject of “culture and civilisation”. He never submitted his final essay, instead asking Elizabeth, whose hauteur arouses much intrigue among her students, out to lunch. So began a 20-year routine of biannual lunch dates that lasted until her death, when she left her papers,
among them notes for an essay on Julian, to our narrator.
As Neil sets out to finish the job, an early reference to The Golden Legend, “that medieval assemblage of miracles and martyrdoms”, puts the unready reader on notice (that presumptuous “that”). So too do the words of Elizabeth’s brother, “pink-cheeked and plump”, who tells Neil he’s “not a literary chap in any way. Though I like a good yarn.” It’s one of several hints that such a thing is far from Barnes’s goal: ditto Neil’s confession that “the voyeur in me wondered if [Elizabeth] had left a laceratingly self-revealing diary… my tawdry imagination was no better than those of the loucher students she had taught”.
The novel confuses the reader’s sense of what is and isn’t significant with a steady drumbeat of caveats – regarding Elizabeth’s romantic life or Neil’s divorces – that turn the narrative into a series of false starts; it’s typical when he begins a sentence by saying “In my case” only to cut himself off (“but my case isn’t relevant”).
