Julian Barnes at 80

Like so many others I first encountered Julian Barnes in the famous issue of Granta, the Best of Young British Novelists in 1983. The magazine included an extract from his Flaubert’s Parrot as well as pieces by Martin Amis, William Boyd, Kazuo Ishiguro, Ian McEwan, William Boyd and Salman Rushdie. All were men (14 of the 20 contributors were men), they were all in their late 20s and early 30s, born in the decade after the war. A new generation was in town.

Ten years later the then editor of Granta, Bill Buford, wrote about this new generation of writers:

“I’m convinced that had it been organized even three years before, it would have flopped: there was too little to promote. … The novel belonged not to the young author, who was writing a play or a television drama or a poem or nothing, but to another, older generation: Iris Murdoch, Angus Wilson, Kingsley Amis, Barbara Pym, Paul Scott, Stanley Middleton…”

Granta’s Best of Young British Novelists 1983.

“But not for long,” Buford continued. “In January of 1980, the beginning of the decade, I had read a short story that was good, but, for reasons that must have been persuasive at the time, not good enough to publish, although apparently good enough for me to want to contact the writer and urge him to send us something else. This resulted in a series of phone calls – to Norwich, London, Guildford – until finally I reached an unknown Kazuo Ishiguro in a bed-sit in Cardiff; the pay-phone was in the hall. Three months later, Adam Mars-Jones published his first story; two months later, Salman Rushdie completed Midnight’s Children.”

Both the “Best of Young British Novelists” issue of Granta and their new novels caught the public imagination. More than forty years later, it feels like the passing of the guard. Amis died in 2023, while Salman Rushdie (who was nearly murdered in 2022) will turn 79 this summer. Julian Barnes has just turned eighty this month and published what he has announced will be his last novel, Departures. It is his 15^th novel under his own name, in addition to four novels written as Dan Kavanagh in the 1980s and numerous books of non-fiction.

Twenty years after Flaubert’s Parrot was first published in 1983, Barnes wrote an article about it in The Guardian. “One evening in 1983,” he began, “I was having a drink with Kingsley Amis. He made the mistake of asking me what I was working on. I made the mistake of telling him. I made the further mistake of not looking across at him, in order the better to concentrate. My account would have involved words such as ‘Flaubert’ and ‘parrot’ and … the phrase ‘an upside-down sort of novel.’ As I was nearing the end of my preliminary outline – still with some way to go – I glanced up, and was confronted with an expression poised between belligerent outrage and apoplectic boredom.”

Barnes had already written two previous novels, Metroland (1980) and Before She Met Me (1982). They had sold barely 1,000 copies each in hardback and according to Barnes, with typical modesty, “had just about staggered into paperback”. At first it didn’t seem that Flaubert’s Parrot would fare much better. When his hardback publishers approached Penguin, they said they liked the novel but turned it down because they felt they wouldn’t be able to sell “a single copy”. Barnes sent Kingsley Amis a copy. Kingsley said that he never got beyond the third chapter.

When Barnes was interviewed by Michael Ignatieff for BBC2’s The Late Show in the early 1990s, Ignatieff asked him about how he became a writer. Barnes replied, “I didn’t become a writer … till I was about 34, so there was obviously a struggle to arrive at that point, but that was a struggle with confidence and subject matter… What was hard was discovering the confidence to think that anyone would be remotely interested in anything I would write.”

All of this is somehow typical of Barnes, a world away from the super-cool Martin Amis or Salman Rushdie appearing on stage with Bono and U2. Flaubert’s Parrot is about a retired English doctor. There is a famous passage in Amis’s breakthrough novel, Money, which begins in New York, “off FDR Drive, somewhere in the early Hundreds.” “[A] low-slung Tomahawk full of black guys came sharking out of lane, sliding off to the right across our bows.” Say what you like about Julian Barnes but he didn’t write much about “low-slung Tomahawks full of black guys”.

There is a scene in Bridget Jones’s Diary when she unexpectedly finds herself standing in front of Barnes at a literary party. The scene is included in the film version, but it was thought that Barnes wasn’t recognisable enough to filmgoers to appear in the scene, so Rushdie was chosen instead.

Of course this is partly an act. Barnes is one of the great British writers of the past forty or so years. Nadine Gordimer praised his novel A History of the World in 10 ½ Chapters as “funny, ironic, erudite, surprising and not afraid to take a dive overboard into the depths of sorrow and loss”. Not many novelists have reviewed Flaubert’s letters for The TLS or written long essays about Anthony Blunt or the fatwa against Rushdie for The New Yorker.

Amis once described going to book-signings with Julian Barnes. All these nice, respectable, decent people come to Barnes to have their copies signed, he said. Then along came Amis’s readers and fans: erupting with acne, near-cretinism and all kinds of physical and moral failings. “He was formidable, quiet, pass-you-by quiet,” Amis said about Barnes. “He still withholds judgments, like a poker-player. And you see it in his novels, this sympathy for quiet people, that they are doing a lot of noticing or suffering or whatever without telling anyone about their emotions.”

And then there is the diversity of Barnes’s novels. There are novels about adultery and childhood in the present (Metroland, Before She Met Me, Talking It Over) and then there are also books which are more philosophical or historical, where fiction shades in and out of nonfiction (Flaubert’s Parrot, obviously, but also A History of the World in 10 ½ Chapters) and political novels set in the present (The Porcupine). There is also the diversity and range of narrative voices. Novels which are chatty, colloquial, erupting into the demotic like this passage in Metroland: “Absolutely fucking typical. Only time you’ve been in the right place at the right time in your whole life, I’d say and where are you? Holed up in an attic stuffing some chippy…”  But also there are novels which are thoughtful, scholarly, almost academic. Take this passage from The Porcupine: “For Stalin to have ordered Kirov’s death was not just ‘out of character’, but beyond our understanding of what character might comprise. … We have moved into a time when ‘character’ is a misleading concept…” The very first page of Metroland is about the meaning and value of art. One critic described Barnes as “one of the most writerly of writers”.

And then there are women. Marriages and relationships in Barnes’s novels do not fare well. Husbands suspect their wives of adultery (often rightly) and wives know their husbands to be “wet” and not very sexually satisfying. The result is a general sense of damage and dissatisfaction, of “marital despair”.

This feeds into a distinctive sense of different perspectives in his writing. “In part, Amanda reflected, it was a matter of how you perceived things.” “There were two ways of reading it: either she was beyond the point of observable pleasure; or else she was asleep.”

It’s hard to imagine that Barnes is now eighty or that he might have written his last novel. To whom will all those respectable, decent readers turn now?

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