Writer Julian Barnes bids a masterful farewell with his last novel

FICTION
Departure(s)
Julian Barnes
Jonathan Cape, $39.99

A Belgian interviewer was blunt: “So, Mr Barnes, you are now 76 and you will never win a Nobel Prize because you are a white man — are you raging against the dying of the light?” – hinting not just at the end of the Booker Prize-winning author’s life but at the passing of his generation of writers. Julian Barnes batted away the question, but it still left a mark.

These days, Barnes and his mostly white, mostly male cohort are thinning in more ways than one. With Martin Amis and Christopher Hitchens departed, their cadre clustered around a shared propensity for drollness, stoicism and a greater fear of cliche than death. It’s all very English. Each not so much raged against the dying light as wrote into it. All three were diagnosed with cancer, the other two having published non-fiction accounts of their struggles. With Barnes approaching 80, his non-terminal diagnosis means he must live with his cancer rather than die from it. His final book Departure(s) claims to be “a work of fiction that doesn’t mean it’s not true”.

Instead of dwelling on enfeeblement, Barnes tells of being reacquainted with two former university friends, Stephen and Jean. Once lovers in their 20s, the pair had split up, too young to settle down. After a “missing middle” and now in his 60s, Stephen asks Barnes to help scheme a chance encounter with Jean to rekindle their former romance. Of the middle, we learn only that Stephen admits he married the “wrong woman”, got divorced but is now intent on correcting a lifelong mistake. Jean sees right through the ruse, but this does not prevent the pair from hitting it off. Soon, they marry, with Barnes their best man. They each confide in him that this is their last chance at happiness. With romantic destiny satisfied, they begin to understand love and life are more complex than winding back a clock.

Barnes reports that such late “rekindlings” have a high probability of success, in the order of 70 per cent, according to the literature. Yet when they go wrong, it spells disaster. Not only is there a breakup to deal with, but the pain that had mellowed over time is resharpened. Barnes’ point has more to do with ageing itself. If given another shot, even with the benefit of all accumulated knowledge, would we just bugger it up again?

Barnes is studying regret by posing a question: What if the meaning that we apply to our lives, wisdom being one of the few consolations of ageing, was not enough to impact life’s course? Despite its romantic veneer, Departure(s) is far more about life than love. Barnes is really suggesting that the pearls we harvest from life’s tribulations may be more fiction, even if that doesn’t mean they are not true. A reader may inquire what nerve an author has to put limits on applying meaning to life after a career spent doing just that.

That aside, his tragic conclusion is enabled by memory’s decline. Barnes uses Involuntary Autobiographical Memory as a counter-thought. In this condition, any action will trigger the recollection of all similar memories. For example, if one eats a sandwich, every other sandwich consumed will come flooding back. Clearly a confusing and overwhelming prospect, Barnes concludes. On the other hand, memory’s decay, while a necessary evil, opens the door to regret. Our recollection loses the fidelity and the intensity of the moment. As such, our retellings overstate our earlier agency and often disregard why we acted as we did.

Another counterpoint: Jimmy, Jean’s Jack Russell, is the most liberated and authentic character. He bites whomever he pleases, rejects sentiment by tearing out the daisies plaited around his matrimonial collar and is utterly unburdened by regret. In old age, he sleeps fitfully and often. While Jimmy has memory, he lacks the human demand that everything must mean something.

Despite never winning a Nobel Prize, Barnes can still find a publisher for anything he writes. Departure(s)’s meandering digressions sometimes become self-indulgent. But we may indulge if we remember that it was once a cardinal sin for a writer to appear as a character in their own fiction. When Martin Amis did it, his father Kingsley tossed his manuscript across the room. This is how the generations change.

As such, we should mourn the end of a career and the diminishment of a generation of writers, even if his rejection that life must mean something feels like kicking the ladder away after him. I, for one, will continue tending to my regrets, which now include Barnes no longer writing.

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