Too many people have been dying lately,” Julian Barnes reflects over the phone from his home in north London. He has muted the Test match, he tells me, so he won’t be tempted to shout at the screen. This is a follow-up conversation to a meeting earlier this year to discuss his latest novel, Elizabeth Finch, in which, although unnamed in the book, Hilary Mantel, who died aged 70 last September, played a key part. Barnes’s great friend Carmen Callil, founder of Virago Press, died a month later. “I did adore her,” he says now. And, since we last spoke, Martin Amis has also died, in May.
“I knew he didn’t want me to ask him how he was,” Barnes says of his final communications with Amis, who moved to New York in 2011. “So we had a kind of football email exchange: ‘What do you think of Arsenal this season?’ and so on. At the end, I got an email saying, in effect, ‘Look after yourself, old friend.’ I took that as it was intended, which was ‘Goodbye.’” Barnes didn’t email him again. “He did it stylishly, as you would expect,” he says. “Stylishly and privately.”
