I never had one of those favourite, well-remembered schoolmasters when I was a boy, one who showed me the excitements of mathematics, or poetry, or botany, and perhaps interfered with me sexually at the same time. So I was the more grateful — though the word is insubstantial compared to the reality — for having met and known Elizabeth Finch. As she said, we must always consider the element of chance in our lives. I don’t know what the average allotment of good luck in a life is or should be — it’s an unanswerable question, and doubtless there is no “should” in it anyway — but I do know that she was part of my good luck.
Well, Mr. Barnes, and what have you got for me today? I don’t benefit from a Classical education, but as Julian Barnes hints on the first page of Elizabeth Finch that this is to be a Socratic dialogue, I am going to broadly interpret the techniques of that teaching method in order to give a sense of what the author appears to be doing here. Divided into three very different sections, I don’t know if this hangs together perfectly as a novel, but as an example of a Socratic dialogue, in which Barnes plays the role of the grey-bearded philosopher — discussing, correcting, exemplifying — it seems a genius device with which he can share what a lifetime has taught him about memory, history, culture, art, and literature. It all gets a little meta in the end — and if I am, indeed, correct in what Barnes is trying to convey, I don’t know if I was completely swayed by his argument — but this was a pleasure to read and to ruminate upon. (Note: I read an ARC through NetGalley and passages quoted may not be in their final forms.)
She was high-minded, self-sufficient, European. And as I write those words, I stop, because I hear in my head something she once taught us in class: “And remember, whenever you see a character in a novel, let alone a biography or history book, reduced and neatened into three adjectives, always distrust that description.” It is a rule of thumb I have tried to obey.
In the first section, we meet the eponymous Elizabeth Finch — a lecturer at London University, teaching a course on “Culture and Civilisation” to an adult class — and as she employs Socratic questioning to collaborative effect, it would appear that she is covering a hodgepodge of cultural artefacts — Hitler’s Table Talk, Carpaccio’s painting of “St. George and the Dragon”, Swinburne’s poem, “Hymn to Proserpine” (Thou hast conquered, O pale Galilean) — as a matter of general interest. Finch’s mind is so compelling and original that the narrator, Neil, continues to have lunch with her regularly for the next twenty years, and upon her death, Neil is surprised to learn that he is to inherit Elizabeth Finch’s notebooks and library.
To please the dead. Naturally, we honour the dead, but in honouring them, we somehow make them even more dead. But to please the dead, this brings them to life again. Does that make sense? It was right that I wanted to please EF, and right that I would keep my promise. And so I did. And this is what I wrote.
Back when he had taken her course, Neil was going through a divorce and decided not to write the final assignment (an essay on any topic of his choosing), but once in possession of Finch’s books and notes, he discovered what linked all of her lectures together (the death of Julian the Apostate — the last pagan Emperor of Rome — whose passing ushered in Christianity and, therefore, every bad thing that happened in the West unto our own time), and he decides to finally write that essay, which is included as Part Two. The most surprising thing to learn was just how many writers and artists and composers dealt with Julian the Apostate as their subject over the years and it was interesting to see how everything in the first part was interconnected.
I sometimes wonder how biographers do it: make a life, a living life, a glowing life, a coherent life out of all that circumstantial, contradictory and missing evidence. They must feel like Julian on campaign with his retinue of diviners. The Etruscans tell him this; the philosophers tell him that; the gods speak, the oracles are silent or obscure; the dreams alarm him this way, his visions propel him that way, the animals’ viscera are ambivalent; the sky says this, the dust storm and the advisory thunderbolt insist otherwise. Where is the truth, where is the way forward?
In the third part, Neil applies to his own life what he has learned through his research on Emperor Julian, and as he considers whether or not he should write a biography of Elizabeth Finch based on her papers, he revisits some classmates from her course and discovers new information about memory and history and how a narrative gets settled. This part feels quite meta — it seems no coincidence that a man named Julian takes as his subject an historical man named Julian — and as each of the three main foci (Elizabeth Finch, Julian the Apostate, and our narrator, Neil) seem to be standins for the author himself, we have the dizzying experience of the author writing about his narrator reading La Modification by Michel Butor on a train, which is a book about a man on a train reading a book about Julian the Apostate. But while there are such moments of frisson and gentle humour throughout, I think that Barnes’ thesis is deadly serious:
Imagine the last fifteen centuries without religious wars, perhaps without religious or even racial intolerance. Imagine science unhindered by religion. Delete all those missionaries forcing belief on indigenous people while accompanying soldiers stole their gold. Imagine the intellectual victory of what most Hellenists believed — that if there was any joy to be had in life, it was in this brief sublunary passage of ours, not in some absurd Disneyfied heaven after we are dead.
Through the three parts of this novel (loosely representing the three stages of a Socratic dialogue: conversation; redirection; and demonstrating understanding), it would seem that Barnes is leading the reader to align with this belief that the rise of Christianity doomed the Western world to the worst of our “civilised” behaviour. Like I began with, this doesn’t make for a totally satisfying “novel”, but it is certainly a worthy philosophical artefact from a genius novelist in his grey-bearded years. Four stars reflect admiration more than enjoyment.
