News

Julian Barnes had originally planned for his then-unwritten book about his long-time fear of death to begin with the sentence: "Let's get this death thing straight." The actual opening to Nothing to be Frightened Of is less insouciant and more personal, but there is a lot to be said for getting things straight. So let's get this reviewing thing straight.

Here are two responses to Barnes's book. 1.) "[A] random collection of thoughts with not much of an attempt to glue them together; not quite the golden treasury you'd expect the lionized novelist to glean from 30 years in the literary jet-set." 2.) "[A] splendid imaginarium of Barnes's musings on death, religion, memory, evolution, a partial memoir of his parents and a literary salon featuring his extended 'family' of writers."

• Nothing to be Frightened Of, by Julian Barnes, Random House Canada, 250 pages, $32.95

The first is from Harry Mount's review in The Telegraph. The second is from this review. To get this reviewing thing straight: Trying to lend an air of the authority to what is at heart a grossly subjective enterprise is sometimes beside the point.

Mount's assessment is so rudely dismissive that he comes across as personally affronted. You can't help but wonder: Does he hate Barnes? Is he jealous of him? Did the author of Flaubert's Parrot, A History of the World in 10½ Chapters, England, England, Arthur & George and a dozen other works of fiction and non-fiction once humiliate him on the cricket pitch when they were lads in short pants?

My own response appears just as outrageously personal. I like Julian Barnes. He manages, from novel to wildly varied novel, to be consistently witty, elegant and profound without pretension, and is a master of both irony and character. Like Barnes, I have been morbidly death-aware (or healthily in touch with the idea of mortality) as long as I can recall. The math of it couldn't be simpler: Favourite Writer + Ideal Subject Matter = Unabashed Delight with Book. A rather Oprah's-Book-Club-ish response (This book spoke to me!!), but there you have it.

“ I don't believe in God, but I miss Him ”— Julian Barnes

Nothing to Be Frightened Of is a splendid imaginarium of Barnes's musings on death (fear of), religion (death of), memory, evolution, a partial memoir of his parents, and a literary salon featuring his extended "family" of writers (mainly French and mainly dead), some of them equally death-haunted. The effect is seamless and kaleidoscopic.

Barnes was an atheist at 20 and an agnostic by his fifties. "I don't believe in God, but I miss Him," the now-62-year-old author begins. The seeming contradiction that gives Nothing to Be Frightened Of its very humane and expansive quality is the very thing that leads Barnes's philosopher brother to call his sentiment "soppy" and liken it to someone missing "dodos" or "yetis." It's as if Barnes wants believe, but can't.

"Perhaps the important divide is less between the religious and the irreligious as between those who fear death and those who don't," Barnes writes. "We fall into four categories, and it's clear which two regard themselves as superior: those who do not fear death because they have faith, and those who do not fear death despite having no faith. ... In third place come those who, despite having faith, can not rid themselves of the old, visceral, rational fear. And then, out of the medals, below the salt, up shit creek, come those of us who fear death and have no faith."

Maybe Harry Mount's outrage is that of the fundamentalist atheist (à la Hitchens and Dawkins) who fears neither hellfire nor oblivion. (Barnes writes: "The fury of the resurrected atheist: that would be something worth seeing.") Why is an internationally acclaimed, highly erudite, bristlingly intelligent writer wasting time missing God? (The assumption here is that faith is solely the province of those not possessing all their faculties.)

Family anecdotes, filtered through fractured memory, accounts of Barnes's elderly parents' deaths, and an ongoing, although seemingly bloodless, rivalry with his very academic brother give Nothing to Be Frightened Of its narrative purchase.

With his parents and grandparents cremated, Barnes has never visited a grave of a family member. Instead, he visits "the graves of various non-blood relatives" (including his hero Flaubert, as well as Stravinsky, Camus, George Sand, Toulouse-Lautrec, Evelyn Waugh, Degas, Stendhal and Jules Renard, to whom this book is largely an hommage) - the dead artists he calls his "my daily companions, but also my ancestors."

It's as a descendant of these companions that Barnes aims his most gimlet-eyed look at death. "A novelist might hope for another generation of readers - two or three if lucky - which may feel like a scorning of death; but it's really just scratching on the wall of the condemned cell. We do it to say: I was here too."

Beyond the extinction of the self, and any continued memory of the self a few hundred years down the road, Barnes considers the extinction, or evolution beyond recognition, of our species six billion years from now, when the Earth has run its course. "[S]o much for that pathetic murmur of I was here too. There is no 'too,' as there will be nothing to which or to whom we can recognizably appeal, nothing that in turn will recognize us."

As far as getting "this death thing straight" goes, Barnes, for the record, is against it. He's anti-death. It's a hopeless, illogical, but honest stance he's held unwaveringly from the dawn of his literary career. His first and only remotely autobiographical novel, Metroland, published in 1981, has a young protagonist, Christopher, who is frequently paralyzed by the horror of "the big D." The elements of Nothing to Be Frightened Of are all here in nascent form: giving God "the boot" for trivial reasons; conversations about death with a clever older brother; and the realization that making art is no bulwark against oblivion in a world that is itself headed toward extinction.

"I wouldn't mind Dying," Christopher says at one point, "if I didn't end up Dead at the end of it."

Contributing reviewer Zsuzsi Gartner contemplates the Grim Reaper in Vancouver.