“What is it about ambiguity,” asked Tim Parks in 2015, “that it has to be praised to high heaven by all and sundry? Above all, how did it come to take on, at least for some, a cloak of liberal righteousness?” Reading Julian Barnes’s new novel, the question feels especially apposite. This is a work that both uses and abuses ambiguity. In doing so, it undermines itself.
Elizabeth Finch, the novel’s eponymous subject, teaches an adult education course in culture and civilisation. The narration comprises the recollections of Neil, her former student and would-be hagiographer. Her class, he tells us, “shook my mind around, made me constantly rethink, burst stars inside my head”. Students were awestruck by “the shimmer of her phrasing, the lustre of her brain”. Under her tutelage they “actually began, in real time, to think for ourselves”.
