In Barnes’ Booker Prize-winning novel, The Sense of an Ending (2012), his narrator is forced to question the way he has understood his life and his relationships to others. But who is this person who has such an impact on his life? How should he understand her? Can he find a way of expressing what she means to him? Problems of understanding Neil, twice divorced and a drifter through life, describes her effect on him as “explosive”.
Her aim, she tells them, is not to impart information or teach according to a syllabus, but to encourage them to find “a centre of seriousness in yourselves”. This is a novel that rejects the rigid convictions of cultural polemics while constructing a qualified but resolute polemic of its own.Neil, the narrator of Julian Barnes’ latest novel, has the problem of interpretation posed for him by Elizabeth Finch, his teacher in a philosophy course on civilisation and culture for adult students.
A book that is, among its many layered identities, a manifesto. The novel is in part a fierce defence of the intellectual values that have directed the course of Barnes’s writing from the first. Alongside the characteristically self-deprecating tone of Neil’s hesitant ruminations stands something more steely. Yet it would be a mistake to think that Barnes is simply repeating old tricks in Elizabeth Finch. The story turns on a long relationship, which changes through the decades it focuses on moments of evocative return. Several features of this novel are located in recognizably Barnesian territory. His elusive example, intertwined with the lives of Neil and his fellow students, leads the reader from a personal narrative to the broader framework of history. A third character, embedded in the ambiguities of textual record and legend, becomes prominent in the narrative: Julian the Apostate, the philosophical Roman emperor.
It is the story of Elizabeth Finch, the enigmatic woman who delivered the course. But, as Neil often tells us, 'this is not my story'. The story of Neil’s life – his only story – turns on his experience of a year-long course for mature students on 'Culture and Civilization' that he once took, and its enduring legacy through years of reflection. More concerned with the ambiguity of ideas than with clarity of plot or character, it is a heartfelt celebration of the life of the mind – though its defiance is qualified by the wryness we would expect from Julian Barnes. This uncompromising novel denies its readers many of the pleasures of fiction.
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