MEMOIR:
Nothing to Be Frightened Of By
Julian Barnes, Jonathan Cape, 250pp. £16.99
A depressing, tedious book about being 60, losing your
parents, and realising that you are next in line, writes
Gabriel Josipovici.
THERE IS a shocking passage near the end of Julian Barnes's new book. He has just been to see his aged, terminally ill mother in hospital.
"Driving back to London, the sun setting in my mirror, the Haffner Symphony on the radio, I thought: if this is what it's like for someone who has worked with her brain all her life, and can afford decent care, I don't want it. Then wondered if I was deluding myself, and would want it, when it came, on any terms; or whether I would have the courage or the cunning to circumvent it; or whether it just happens, and by happening condemns you to see it through, ragingly, dreadingly."
What is shocking about this is that there is not a shred of sympathy for the dying woman, his mother after all, but only an obsession with himself and his own death, and that he is not even aware of this as being shocking. But then the world this book reveals is so lacking in any kind of human warmth that perhaps I should have been expecting this. The image of his parents, both teachers, who, after a life in London's outer suburbs, retire to a bungalow in Oxfordshire, is of people who cannot or will not show any emotion. When Julian Barnes asks his brother what he thinks of their parents, he answers:
"I suppose their most remarkable characteristic - tho' not at all remarkable at the time - was the complete, or almost complete, lack of emotion, or at any rate, lack of public expression of emotion. I don't recall either of them being seriously angry, or frightened, or delirious with joy. I incline to think that the strongest feeling Mother ever allowed herself was severe irritation, while Father no doubt knew all about boredom."
It is clear where the sons' sympathies lie: the mother, they seem to feel, was the controlling bully, and the father's silence perhaps only his way of protecting himself. But she comes through as not just a bully, but almost mad. Once, her son remembers, she wondered out loud which would be worse, to grow deaf or to grow blind. Blind, definitely, she thought, because then I wouldn't be able to do my nails.
BUT THIS IS not, thank God, another book about a child's gripe against his parents. Quite what sort of a book it is, though, it is difficult to say. Mainly, it is about being 60 and losing your parents and realising that you are next in line for the Grim Reaper. And, as the passage I began with suggests, it turns into an extended meditation on how one meets death. In the course of that, Julian Barnes recounts many conversations on this topic and on others connected with their family, between him and his brother, the Aristotelian philosopher Jonathan Barnes, and with his parents from the time when he was still a child to the time when he had to visit them in hospital as first the father and then the mother finally succumbed.
Julian Barnes and his brother both seem to have inherited their mother's need to be in control, not ever to be taken in by sentiment. Of his earliest experience of church-going, his brother remarks: "I seem to remember being mystified, an infantile anthropologist among the anthropophagi." Julian, for his part, half recognises that this is the flip side of a Romantic and idealistic sensibility: "I was an idealistic adolescent," he remembers, "who swerved easily into suspicion when confronted with life's realities . . . My kicks were those of a disheartened Romantic."
"I hope, Barnes," one of his teachers says to him, "that you're not one of those bloody back-row cynics." "Me, sir? Cynic, sir? Oh no - I believe in baa-lambs and hedgerow blossom and human goodness, sir," the grown-up Barnes responds across the years. But this kind of smartness soon palls. It's bright but it tries too hard to shock, like the joke that he likes so much he repeats it: "Alzheimer's? Forget it." Barnes clearly prides himself on his realism, which he likes to think brings him close to his beloved Flaubert. But the trouble with this English brand of realism is that it yields an impoverished view of life and leaves Barnes prey to all the fears he has striven to repress. More than once he tells us that he wakes up sweating in the night, terrified of dying. But after reading 250 pages in which he does nothing but circle round and round his fear of death and dying, this elicits no sympathy from the reader. It becomes too much like listening to someone recount their dreams at tedious length. One has no doubt it is important to them, but they are so locked into their own world that it becomes, for others, a bore and an embarrassment.
READING BARNES, LIKE reading so many of the other English writers of his generation, Martin Amis, Ian McEwan, Blake Morrison, or a critic from an older generation who belongs with them, John Carey, leaves me feeling that I and the world have been made smaller. The irony that at first made one smile, the precision of language that was at first so satisfying, the cynicism that at first was used only to puncture pretension, in the end come to seem like terrible constrictions, a fear of opening oneself up to the world. They all come out of Philip Larkin's overcoat, and clearly their brand of writing and the nature of their vision, like his, speaks to the English, for they are the most successful writers of their generation. I wonder, though, where it came from, this petty-bourgeois uptightness, this terror of not being in control, this schoolboy desire to boast and to shock. We don't find it in Irish or American culture or in French or German or Italian culture. The English have always been repressed and ironical, but there was never that sense of prep school boys showing off, which to me is the taste of these contemporary writers. This book brings it out starkly. The greatest literary expressions of the encounter with death, Sophocles's Oedipus at Colonus, the death of Cordelia, Proust's account of the death of his grandmother, all recognise a mystery. Barnes never does. His pathological dread of being taken in means that, in the end, despite the excellence of the writing, despite the wit, despite one's sympathies with some of his views, reading this book is a diminishing and depressing experience.
Gabriel Josipovici is a novelist and critic. His most recent books are Everything Passes (fiction) and The Singer on the Shore (essays), both published by Carcanet in 2006