A Novel Way to Approach Death

Everyone loves Julian Barnes. I don't know of any other novelist who has been praised by both David Bowie and Angela Merkel. He has also been praised by Philip Larkin, Graham Greene, and John Updike, even if Updike referred to him as "an English television critic," which Barnes was at the time. (Updike was reviewing Barnes's third novel, Flaubert's Parrot, which ended up on the shortlist for a Booker Prize.)

Why does everyone love Barnes? Bowie seems initially vague: "I love Stephen King. Scares the shite out of me," he told Q magazine in 1999. "But I really like Julian Barnes as well, which is another world."

That contrast is spot on, as it turns out. Everyone loves Barnes because he doesn't scare the shite out of us. He's unassuming and charming—and never melodramatic, even if he writes frequently about death and love gone wrong. His novels are difficult to put down once you pick them up. This is especially true with his latest novel—he says it's his last—Departure(s).

The title announces that this is another novel about death—in this case Barnes's own. It opens with the author learning in 2020 that he has a rare form of blood cancer: myeloproliferative neoplasm. The cancer is untreatable but "manageable," meaning it cannot be killed but probably won't kill him if he undergoes regular treatments. He will likely die of some ordinary cause, though he finds this slightly disappointing: "He would rather die of his own disease, thank you very much, not everybody else's."

It's not every day that one gets diagnosed with an untreatable but manageable cancer, and another writer might have jumped at the chance to write a long "elegiac" novel about death. Not Barnes, who recently turned 80. He chastises himself for using "moribund adjectives" and announces early on his intention to keep things short. As writers "get older," he notes, "either they grow egotistically expansive or they think: contain yourself and cut to the chase. Verdi once observed that in old age he 'learned how to write less music.' And no, I'm not comparing myself to Verdi."

Of course, Barnes is comparing himself to Verdi, and he's not wrong. His unflamboyant prose is similar in some ways to Verdi's compositions: The apparent simplicity disguises the artistry required to create a voice (or melody) so seemingly natural. It is this voice, a persona of Barnes, that usually drives his novels forward, not character or plot, and it does so effectively here.

Departure(s) is one of Barnes's hybrid novels, as he calls them. It has a story within a story—a narrative sandwiched in the middle of an account of a contemporaneous event. In the case of Departure(s), Barnes's account of his cancer diagnosis and treatment is interrupted by "A Letter from the Past"—a college friend enlists Barnes’s help in getting back together with an old flame, and Barnes agrees against his better judgment.

Sometimes this story within the story is far less interesting than what surrounds it. I skimmed over the narrative sections of Elizabeth Finch, Barnes's previous novel. Barnes doesn't always handle dialogue effectively and can sometimes seem disinterested in his characters.

But that wasn't the case with Departure(s). The narrative of the two friends is as engaging as Barnes's account of his cancer and musings about memory and death. That this narrative has a beginning and an end but no middle shows that Barnes is at the top of his game in this final work. Who else could write such an entertaining book about a cancer diagnosis with a fragmented story?

Barnes can sometimes seem insubstantial. He is clearly aware of this. He writes toward the end of Departure(s):

I am not a didactic writer. I do not tell you what to think or how to live. I do not write ex cathedra: novelists shouldn’t speak down to readers from an assumption of greater wisdom. Instead, I prefer an image of writer and reader on a cafe pavement in some unidentified town in some unidentified country. Warm weather and a cool drink in front of us. Side by side, we look out at the many and varied expressions of life that pass in front of us.

Occasionally, Barnes can be dogmatic about the absence of an afterlife, but this is otherwise true of his approach to writing—and it is one that is in short supply today. Too many novelists are preoccupied with sounding important whether they have anything important to say or not. A novel should be fun, he reminds us, even if it is a serious kind of fun.

Barnes is of the same generation as Martin Amis (a friend until they fell out), Ian McEwan, and Salman Rushdie. Amis never won the Booker Prize. Barnes, McEwan, and Rushdie all have. Who will still be read 20 or 30 years from now?

It's a pointless question, the author would likely say. We will all be forgotten eventually. True enough. But it'll be a good thing for our culture if Barnes is forgotten less quickly than others.

Departure(s): A Novel
by Julian Barnes
Knopf, 176 pp., $27

Micah Mattix has written for the Wall Street Journal and many other publications.

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