When is a novel not a novel? To be fair, there is a story in here but Barnes has some digressing to do, some departures to make before we get to it.
In the opening pages alone we touch on everything from presumably lonely folk sticking busts of Napoleon in far more isolated spots than St Helena to US president Jimmy Carter admitting in an interview with Playboy magazine that he had committed adultery in his dreams. The latter forms a part of a meditation on memory brought about by reading of the case of a man who, after a stroke, could not eat a piece of pie without triggering the recollection of every such piece eaten across an entire lifetime.
Barnes reasons that this condition would be a lot harder to live with had it related to flatulence but such an “involuntary autobiographical memory” does allow him to make further digressions in the direction of trepanning as found in the work of Hieronymus Bosch and Proust’s memory-prompting madeleine before the reassuring declaration that “there will be a story” and the disappointing one that “This will be my last book”.
The story Barnes writes, interspersed with what are, as he points out, easily googleable facts from his own life, has no middle, as this is how fading memory sometimes catalogues life for the old. He meets Stephen and Jean at university and then their lives intersect again roughly 40 years later.
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He concludes this blend of autofiction and enjoyable rambling (“That hybrid stuff you do,” says Jean. “I think it’s a mistake.”) by saying a grateful goodbye. Diagnosed with manageable blood cancer, more a life than a death sentence in his eyes, which he may beat by dying from something else, he seems determined (to clumsily call back to my opening line) not to leave the door ajar for another book.
He promises to tell us the rest of Stephen and Jean’s story another time but he won’t. “The head and the heart are still working, as the body declines, but better that way round,” although he’s still headed for “the Departure which will be followed by no Arrival”. Fearing he may be repeating himself after decades of being published, he’s knocking it on the head, which is a shame as Departure(s), like so much of his work, makes for very worthwhile reading.
[ Is silence golden? When writers choose to stopOpens in new window ]
Pat Carty is a freelance arts journalist and broadcaster, specialising in books and music.
