Review: Vivien Horler

Departure(s), by Julian Barnes (Jonathan Cape)

In contemplating his own death, the novelist and essayist Julian Barnes says there are minor consolations to the idea of being dead, including the fact that when you are on the cliff-edge, so to speak, you know you will miss the worst of what may be to come for the world.

This book is a farewell of sorts; Barnes tells us early on it is his last book. The “Departure(s)” of the title refers to several, including his own. He turned 80 early this year, and writes he is aware that “shortly I shall exist as only a shelf-ful (sic) of books plus a cluster of Biographical Anecdotes”.

He bids farewell to his readers: “… I hope you’ve enjoyed our relationship over the years. I certainly have. Your presence has delighted me – indeed, I would be nothing without you”.

But this is not a tragic book – it’s often very funny. There is the delight of Barnes’s discursive comments on what he is writing. And there is a dog.

Departure(s) is a hybrid sort of book – part love story (which may or not be true), part memoir and part essay on life and love and memory and death.

Jean, the female side of the love story, gives her opinion on what her friend Julian writes. “This hybrid stuff you do – I think it’s a mistake. You should do one thing or the other.”

Julian naturally disagrees.

Julian meets Jean and Stephen at Oxford, in fact he introduces them. And they rapidly fall in love. They are sweet together, Julian tells us, although sometimes Jean thinks Stephen is very young (Julian points out they are the same age).

Remembering the Oxford of the mid-60s, Julian tells us only 16% of the students were women, which led to much “furtive gazing in classes and lectures”.

Couples would become established, and then as the end of their university careers apporached there was often the phenomenon of what he calls “marriage by panic” – couples seeing the end of their university days coming and deciding to marry.

Or, by contrast, they might decide to spit up instead and sail into their adult lives unemcumbered.

This is the course Jean and Stephen took. So the love story that Julian relates comes in two parts – the short period at Oxford, then a break of more than 40 years during which the major parts of their lives are led, and finally a divorced Stephen persuading a widowed Julian to engineer a meeting with a never-married Jean, all of them now in their 60s. This culminates in a wedding a few months later.

You’ll have to read the book to find out whether there is a happy ending.

In the section of the book between Jean and Stephen’s two love stories, Barnes slips into memoir mode and describes his diagnosis with a rare form of blood cancer. It is not terminal – he is told he is likely to die with it rather than of it – but he needs to take a chemotherapy pill daily to keep it at bay.

He also ponders the sudden death of his wife from a brain tumour at the age of 68 (Barnes’s wife, the literary agent Pat Kavanagh, did die of a brain tumour at 68).

In the month or so between his wife’s diagnosis and death, he fights off his terror by telling himself it is “just the universe doing its stuff”, a small comfort.

Another comfort is Jimmy Jack Russell, which Julian inherits from Jean (there was a real-life Jimmy, a Jack Russell, in Barnes’s life) who despite being elderly enjoys walks, his favourite people, and the pleasures or disappointments of of his dog bowl. Jimmy prefers human food, but Julian tells him: “You’re a dog, Jimmy. You get dog food.”

Without memory, says Julian, we would be reduced to some kind of animal existence in the moment, a lesser life form than Jimmy.

But then on the subject of memory he writes of a phenomenon called “involuntary autobiographical memory” which could happen to someone with a brain injury. In a specific case reported in the journal Neurological Clinical Practice, tasting an apple pie would trigger a cascade of memories of all the apple pies the patient had ever tasted, in chronological order.

This leads Julian – or is it Barnes? the line is becoming increasingly blurred – to speculate about which specific memories could be triggered: perhaps you could experience every fart you’d produced, or even every orgasm.

Towards the end of the book he wonders if it could provoke a memory of the journey down the birth canal. And then he adds, with a delightful touch of whimsy: “Though for myself I’m not sure I would like to revisit my mother again in such circumstances. I’d rather revisit her when she was making sandwiches on a sunny afternoon.” Quite.

Julian Barnes has published 14 novels, being acclaimed for Flaubert’s Parrot in 1984, and winning the Booker Prize in 2011 for The Sense of an Ending. His work has been translated into 50 languages and has sold 10 mllion copies across the world.

He tells us at the end of this book he will miss us, his readers. If this is truly his last book, we will miss him. But when he goes, there will still be that shelf-ful of books that we can reread, remember and delight in.