Julian Barnes isn’t exactly afraid of death, but it’s not a condition he aspires to. It’s also probably fair to say that he’s concerned about death, and his aging body has done nothing to ease that concern. His latest book is a nonfiction hybrid that is part extended essay, part memoir, and part playful narrative. There are all sorts of interesting angles in this book, including a hefty dose of sibling rivalry between Julian and his philosopher brother Jonathan Barnes, an exploration of the French writer Jules Renard (a relative), and a kind of internal tussle between the personal Julian Barnes and the authorial character of Barnes, whose books will survive the man.
That Barnes’ famous agent wife, Pat Kavanagh, died suddenly and fairly shortly after the publication of this book is both proof of the uncertainty around every corner (as if we needed that proof) and cruel irony for the author. It’s an irony he prefigures in the book, though around himself, rather than his vibrant wife, who must have seemed immortal. But, of course — and this is one of the points that Barnes makes so well — we can’t really second-guess death. Nor can we begin to believe that we will really die, even when it has become obvious. It’s simply beyond our ken – like the pencil point beginnings of the universe we live in – too outside of everyday experience to make sense of. Barnes’ scholarship on the subject is wide-reaching, done with the absorption of one who is deeply interested in his own subject:
"…Koestler observed many of those about to die — including, as he was assured, himself — and came to the following conclusions. First, that no one, even in the condemned cell, even hearing the sound of their friends and comrades being shot, can ever truly believe in his own deadh; indeed Koestler thought this fact could be expressed quasi-mathematically – ‘One’s disbelief in death grows in proportion to its approach.’" (137)
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