Girl Gone Missing (A Cash Blackbear Mystery)

 

Sharon aimed at the seven ball. “Did you hear about that chick who disappeared from Dahl Hall? Kids are saying maybe she got pregnant and went home. Then someone said she hitchhiked down to the Cities, but she hasn’t come back. Her parents were at the Dean’s office this morning.”

I subscribe to Raven Reads (a quarterly surprise goodie box that contains Indigenous books and merchandise), so it’s out of my control if I’m sent a book that doesn’t really match my reading tastes. Girl Gone Missing is billed as a Mystery (in the “Gone Girl on the Train” fashion) — which probably wouldn’t grab my attention these days — and while author Marcie R. Rendon has created a really interesting main character in amateur sleuth Renee “Cash” Blackbear, as the second book in a series, I ended up playing a lot of catch up with her back story…and not really enjoying the mystery. I want to acknowledge that after reading the Author’s Note at the end, I can appreciate what Rendon was trying to share with her audience about both the scourge of missing Indigenous women and the lingering trauma for those Indigenous children who were raised in abusive white foster homes — and it’s for these insights that I love my reading subscription and did find interest in this novel — but this is not really in my wheelhouse and others have enjoyed it more; perhaps take my review with a grain of salt and pick it up yourself.

Cash leafed through the dresses as if they were pages of a book. Images flashed through her mind as she touched each one: A classroom full of laughing kids. A dance at the Legion Hall. A church choir singing loudly. She touched a soft blue wool sweater — goose bumps ran up her arm. She shivered and saw a girl floating over a dirt field calling, “Help me.”

From the first page, we realise that Cash (an enrolled member of the White Earth Chippewa Nation) has dreams and waking visions that might be helpful in solving crimes. We eventually learn that she was raised in a series of abusive foster families, and after a local sheriff rescued her and set her up in an apartment in Fargo — and encouraged the bright young woman to use a government program to enrol in Moorhead State college across the Red River in Minnesota — she is now, reluctantly, enduring her first semester of higher education. Cash spends her days in class, her evenings driving a dump truck for the local farmers’ beet harvest, and her spare time smoking Marlboros, drinking Bud, and practising her pool skills at the local dive bar. When a local girl goes missing, the sheriff, Wheaton, enlists Cash’s help in finding her.

The story is set in the Seventies and the streets are filled with bell-bottomed Free Love hippies, shell-shocked Vietnam vets, and long-braided members of the nascent American Indian Movement. Despite a really challenging personal history, Cash seems a bit naive about the real world — people explain to her what a pimp is and confirm that the Grain Exchange that’s she’s heard about on the radio is a real place in “the Cities” down South — but even so, when called upon, Cash will put herself in danger to help others.

He looked at her and smiled, a smile that reached his eyes. “Good one,” was all he said. It was enough — but not quite enough to fill the enormous void created by all of the losses she’d had during her short lifetime. But she kept those feelings from her eyes and grinned back at Wheaton.

Again: The mystery element was pretty straightforward and solved easily, but as Rendon explains in her Author’s Note, she wanted to have Cash help look for some missing white girls in order to highlight the plight of “missing, murdered, and unwanted women everywhere” and demonstrate the character’s generosity in showing concern for people who were not from her own community; a lesson we could all learn in the face of the disproportionate number of Indigenous women who disappear across North America. And that’s worth reading about.

The Colony

 

That’s what artists do, James. Take from each other, learn from each other. That’s what we’re doing here, in our little artist’s colony. 

James fingered his cup. It doesn’t seem right, Mr Lloyd.

The Colony is a sneakily allegorical exploration of colonisation and its enduring effects on colonised people; it’s sneaky because it seems quiet and measured, but this is a book that roars beneath the surface. Set on a tiny island off the west coast of Ireland in 1979, author Audrey Magee imagines this last outpost of monolingual Irish speakers under existential threat from two summer lodgers: an English painter (who fancies himself a modern day Gaugin; re-interpretive, not derivative, surely) and a French linguist (on the final year of the research that will be the basis of his PhD thesis, he resents the presence of an English speaker influencing his subjects’ virgin syntax). Throughout, Magee inserts impassive accounts of lethal attacks between Catholics and Protestants in Northern Ireland — 1979 was the height of violence in The Troubles, culminating in the bombing deaths of Lord Mountbatten and his family while on a sea cruise — and while at first these interludes may seem to be background colour, they eventually make clear that the few dozen inhabitants of this unnamed island consider themselves to be thoroughly Irish; fully developed adults with opinions and self-awareness of their position in the world (hardly the “primitives” who would need an Englishman and a Frenchman to argue over what’s best for them.) This works as both historical fiction and as an exploration of an enduringly thorny topic, and I loved the whole thing. Rounding up to five stars. (Note: I read an ARC through NetGalley and passages quoted may not be in their final forms.)

self-portrait: at sea
I’d like you to sing, he said.
We don’t sing, Mr Lloyd.
But I need something to focus on. Counting or singing.
Not in this boat.
I read in a book that you people always sing while rowing.
Not a very good book then, is it, Mr Lloyd?
I came here because of it.
The boatman looked past Lloyd, at the land behind.
You need a better book, Mr Lloyd.
It seems that I do.

Mr Lloyd is a middle-aged traditionalist landscape artist — desperate to make himself relevant in the modernist London art scene alongside Auerbach, Bacon, and Freud — and he has an idea of how his ideal undiscovered country will look, and the money to pursue his follies (money enough to pay a couple of fishermen to row him across the Atlantic for nine hours in a flat-bottomed canvas currach because he saw the scene in a book once). There’s a whiff of flag-planting about Lloyd, but as the above early exchange between Lloyd and his hosts demonstrates, it will be hard for this Englishman to get the better of the Irish in a debate. Lloyd does seem to be a serious and talented painter, and as the summer progresses and fifteen-year-old local, James, begins to paint alongside him, Lloyd becomes more humanised and integrated with the community.

One of the great delights of The Colony is the seamless interior monologuing that passes from character to character. Lloyd demonstrates what a twit he is when titling every scene he looks upon as though it is already painted (as above: self-portrait: at sea, elsewhere: island scene: mass on sunday or self-portrait: becoming an islander), and there’s something very self-consciously Proustian about the French linguist’s stream-of-consciousness (and particularly as his mother was an Algerian Arab and his father an abusive French soldier who demonstrated against his wife’s body the violence of French colonialism; Jean-Pierre might be on the island as a saviour of the Irish language, but he wants you to know that he’s 100% French):

An Englishman. In this, my final summer. He shouldn’t be here, not on this island, not in this yard, for this is my place, my retreat, where I sit, alone, at the end of the day, hidden by the whitewashed walls from the rest of the island, from the islanders, the evening sun on my closed eyes as I dissect the day’s language and analyse the phrases and inflections, the intonations and borrowings, hunting for influences of English, for traces of that foreign language creeping onto the island, into the houses, into the mouths and onto the tongues of the islanders, tracking those tiny utterances that signal change, marking the beginning of the end of Irish on the island, these thoughts, this knowledge, encased and protected by the smallness and stillness of this yard, with only the birds to hear my mutterings, as it was in the wood-panelled courtyard of my grandmother’s house on the edge of the village far from the town, further still from the city, sitting on my own at the circular table cast of iron, under the willow tree, the birds above me, around me, witness to my childhood mumblings on those early summer mornings, my parents, my aunts, my cousins still sleeping, my grandmother in the kitchen, humming as she prepared my hot chocolate, a freshness and softness to her movements that would later, as the day aged, become irritated and hardened, but then, in the early morning, as I sat outside, alone in the courtyard, as she stirred the chocolate powder into the warm milk, she was gentle, smiling as she set the blue and white bowl in front of me, smiling still when she returned from the kitchen with a basket of bread, with butter and jam, with a teaspoon, a knife, a napkin and a glass of water, setting them all in front of me, ruffling my hair, telling me how happy she was to see me again, to have me to stay, and I, aware even then of the transience of our intimacy, kissed her hand, her skin not yet old but beginning to grow old, holding her until she pulled away and returned to the kitchen, her slippers slapping the tiled floor still to be warmed by the day’s sun, leaving me alone again with the birds. As it had been here. As I had been here. Alone, in this yard, until now, until the arrival of this Englishman with his English talk. Masson lifted the brush and slammed it against the concrete. Damn you, Lloyd. This yard is mine.

As an added bonus: as Jean-Pierre begins writing the intro to his dissertation while on the island, The Colony contains a very succinct history of the English colonisation of Ireland and how it led to the attacks that everyone is hearing about on the radio when they gather for evening meals. Lloyd and Jean-Pierre debate the effects of colonisation — Lloyd taking the view that there’s not much tragic about languages dying out if it improves a people’s economic situation — and even though Jean-Pierre (despite the burden of having rejected his mother’s cultural heritage) thinks of himself as the island’s lone cultural champion, both of these men fantasise about their work generating fame and fortune and drawing newspaper and film crews to this tiny outpost.

Imagine that, said Mairéad. A Frenchman and an Englishman squabbling over our turf.
They’ve been squabbling over our turf for centuries, said Francis.
I suppose they have.

Yet while the Frenchman and the Englishman have their great debates about the island’s future, it’s obvious that the islanders aren’t naive about their situation: with young people moving away and too few older folks remaining to support a traditional way of life, their community will need to evolve into something else. Mairéad (James’ widowed mother) dials the common experience down to the personal: All of the men she meets want to protect or possess her, and while this or that one might believe he is taking advantage, Mairéad is (like the islanders as a whole) a fully developed, mature person who has her own desires and motivations; no one need feel sorry for Mairéad. Even so, James will end up being used in a way that demonstrates the worst of colonial impulses (manipulation, exploitation, appropriation), and ultimately, Magee says something very powerful and necessary about how the effects of colonialism linger in the psyches of people on each side of the power divide. Simply a remarkable example of a well-written book with something important to say.

The 2022 Booker Shortlist

The Seven Moons of Maali Almeida by Shehan Karunatilaka (the winner)

Oh William! by Elizabeth Strout

The Trees by Percival Everett 

Treacle Walker by Alan Garner

Glory by NoViolet Bulawayo

Small Things Like These by Claire Keegan

I found I didn't really have the interest to read the rest of this year's longlist, but I did read:

The Colony by Audrey Magee (my favourite overall)

After Sappho by Naomi Alderman

Nightcrawling by Lelia Mottley

The Marriage Portrait

 

“I am going to commission a new one immediately,” Alfonso exclaims. “An allegorical scene or a religious one. Or, now I look at her here, I am thinking perhaps just a three quarter profile, exactly as she is. A marriage portrait. What do you think?”

I haven’t read a lot of Maggie O’Farrell, but I very much enjoyed both her memoir (I Am, I Am, I Am) and her last historical novel (Hamnet; on the death of Shakespeare’s son, which won multiple literary prizes), so I expected to like The Marriage Portrait very much as well. And it was just okay. More historical fiction than literary fiction, this is an imagining of the life and marriage of Lucrezia de’ Medici, and while the plot is an interesting enough take on the time and place (Florence and Ferrara in the mid-sixteenth century), I made little emotional connection with the characters (and honestly found more psychological insight into the Duke of Ferrara in Robert Browning’s inspirational poem “My Last Duchess” and the corresponding analysis to be found on it at The Poetry Foundation website). I don’t regret picking this up — I learned a lot (and especially off the page) — but this wasn’t an entirely successful novel for me. (Note: I read an ARC through NetGalley and passages quoted may not be in their final forms.)

How will he do it? Part of her would like to ask him this. The knife in a dark corridor? His hands about her throat? A tumble from a horse made to look like an accident? She has no doubt that all of these would fall within his repertoire. It had better be done well, would be her advice to him, because her father is not someone who will take a lenient view of his daughter’s murder. She sets down her cup; she lifts her chin; she turns her eyes on to her husband, Alfonso, Duke of Ferrara, and wonders what will happen next.

As the novel opens, Lucrezia, at sixteen, has been married for a year to the mercurial Duke of Ferrara. Having been spirited away from the palace to a dank hunting lodge in the woods for a “rest”, Lucrezia becomes convinced that her husband has isolated her in order to kill her. Sections alternate between long stretches that detail Lucrezia’s backstory and shorter bits that describe the events that transpire at the lodge, and a centerpiece in each timeline is the creation and unveiling of a marriage portrait of his wife that the Duke commissions from his Court painter, Il Bastianino (I don’t believe this portrait exists; it is not the one used as the cover art.) And why would the Duke want to murder his young bride? Could it be because she has failed to provide him with a desperately needed heir within the first year of marriage?

Lucrezia stands there, in her travelling dress, in her fifteen year-old skin. She feels as though these people desire to see right through her; they are like anatomists who peel back the hides of animals to peer inside, who unclothe muscle from skin and vein from bone, assessing and concluding and noting. They, all of them, pulse with the craving, the need, to see a child growing within her, to know that an heir is secured for them. They see her as the portal, the means to their family’s survival. Lucrezia wants to fasten her cloak about herself, to hide her hands up her sleeves, to tie her cap to her head, to pull a veil over her face. You shall not look at me, she wants to say, you shall not see into me. I will not be yours. How dare you assess me and find me lacking? I am not La Fecundissima and never will be.

O’Farrell implies that the Duke was interested in marrying a Medici daughter because their mother had had so many children that she had been nicknamed “La Fecundissima”, and as he in his years of youthful indiscretions had failed to father even a bastard child, Alfonso had thought he was getting himself a brood mare from proven lines (the Duke had originally been engaged to an older Medici sister but turned his attention to a then twelve-year-old Lucrezia upon Maria’s sudden death). The plot provides plenty of space for colour (the customs, the clothing, the politics), and there is satisfying tension in discovering whether or not Lucrezia’s husband is actually trying to kill her, but I didn’t really like the details of the plot (not the encounter with the tiger, not Lucrezia’s constant daydreaming and dissociating, not the reason for Jacopo’s muteness), but worst of all I didn’t like the actual ending. Not touching or exciting or lyrical, the plot hitting some fairly expected beats: this was just okay.

Foster

 

I wonder what it will be like, this place belonging to the Kinsellas. I see a tall woman standing over me, making me drink milk still hot from the cow. I see another, less likely version of her in an apron, pouring pancake batter onto a frying pan, asking would I like another, the way my mother sometimes does when she is in good humour. The man will be no taller than her. He will take me to town on the tractor and buy me red lemonade and crisps. Or he’ll make me clean out sheds and pick stones and pull ragweed and docks out of the fields. I see him taking what I hope will be a fifty pence piece from his pocket but it turns out to be a handkerchief. I wonder if they live in an old farmhouse or a new bungalow, whether they will have an outhouse or an indoor bathroom with a toilet and running water. I picture myself lying in a dark bedroom with other girls, saying things we won’t repeat when morning comes.

Foster is quite short (it took about an hour to read) but it contains an entire novel’s worth of story and emotional depth. Set in the early ‘80s in rural County Wexford, Ireland, a young girl is sent to live with an aunt and uncle she has never met while her overworked mother prepares for the birth of her fifth child. I do love an Irish storyteller, and Foster delighted me in setting and voice. Author Claire Keegan packs so much into this — between what is written and what remains unsaid — and in no small measure, it filled and broke my heart. A complete pleasure, I will definitely read Keegan again. (Note: I read an ARC of an impending, expanded rerelease of Foster through NetGalley and passages quoted may not be in their final forms.)

And so the days pass. I keep waiting for something to happen, for the ease I feel to end: to wake in a wet bed, to make some blunder, some big gaffe, to break something, but each day follows on much like the one before.

As the novel begins, the girl (unnamed) is driven to the farm of her mother’s sister and unceremoniously dropped off by the father who we eventually learn is lazy and feckless and given to drink and gambling. The girl is dirty and anxious and used to work and want, but as her aunt and uncle — who have no children of their own — take loving and empathetic care of her, the girl begins to blossom into happiness. Some secrets will be revealed, some will remain hidden, and throughout, Keegan leaves hints of what the girl’s life must have been at home:

‘You should wash your hands and face before you go to town,’ he says. ‘Didn’t your father even bother to teach you that much?’
I freeze in the chair, waiting for something much worse to happen, but Kinsella does nothing more; he just stands there, locked in the wash of his own speech.

As the summer plays out, her aunt enlists the girl to help with genial household chores and her uncle makes a game out of timing her as she races to the mailbox at the end of the lane for him:

‘It’d be a swift man that would catch you, long legs. We’ll try you again tomorrow and see if we can’t improve your time.’
‘I’ve to go faster?’
‘Oh aye,’ he says. ‘By the time this summer ends you’ll be like a reindeer. There’ll not be a man in the parish will catch you without a long-handled net and a racing bike.’

Eventually, and as expected, her mother gives birth and the Kinsellas are asked to drive the girl back to her crowded, chaotic life; and as loyal as she does remain to her mother, the girl understands that she can never reveal the details of her happy weeks of “foster care”:

‘Nothing happened .’ This is my mother I am speaking to but I have learned enough, grown enough, to know that what happened is not something I need ever mention. It is my perfect opportunity to say nothing.

Ultimately, this makes you question what’s best for the girl: Of course she was expected to return home when her parents were ready to care for her again (although, as the oldest, maybe it doesn’t make complete sense that she hadn’t been needed at home to help care for her younger siblings as her mother became incapacitated), but she had such a lovely and loving summer — with family who were so pleased to have a child in the house — that I couldn’t help but feel bad for her return. This story amused and affected me in the moment, and left me thinking about it long after the last page was turned, and I can see why it was an award winner when it was first released.

Super-Infinite: The Transformations of John Donne

 

He loved to coin formations with the super-prefix: super-edifications, super-exaltation, super-dying, super-universal, super-miraculous. It was part of his bid to invent a language that would reach beyond language, because infinite wasn’t enough: both in heaven, but also here and now on earth, Donne wanted to know something larger than infinity. It was absurd, grandiloquent, courageous, hungry.

I couldn’t say what prompted me to read a biography of John Donne — in my mind he was frozen as the stern elder preacher who would chillingly warn down the length of a gnarled and bony finger it tolls for thee — so I am delighted to have so enjoyed Katherine Rundell’s Super-Infinite, reminding me that even those dusty old poets, forever frozen in woodcut portraits on foxed anthologies’ frontispieces, were once young and striving and pulsing with life. As Rundell reports, there is only the sketchiest of biographical information available on Donne, but with an exuberant and colourful writing style, she brings his world alive and makes the case that not only was Donne one of the greatest innovators of the English language in his day, but that he arguably remains the greatest writer of desire in English of all time. With such big claims satisfyingly supported, I was entertained and educated throughout; delighted after all to have taken this plunge on Donne. (Note: I read an ARC through NetGalley and passages quoted may not be in their final forms.)

Sometime religious outsider and social disaster, sometime celebrity preacher and establishment darling, John Donne was incapable of being just one thing. He reimagined and reinvented himself, over and over: he was a poet, lover, essayist, lawyer, pirate, recusant, preacher, satirist, politician, courtier, chaplain to the King, dean of the finest cathedral in London. It’s traditional to imagine two Donnes — Jack Donne, the youthful rake, and Dr Donne, the older, wiser priest, a split Donne himself imagined in a letter to a friend — but he was infinitely more various and unpredictable than that.

By the time he was appointed Dean of St. Paul’s Cathedral by King James I, not only did parishioners risk their lives to hear Donne speak to crushing crowds, but his sermons were often collected and published and widely scrutinised. As for his earlier work, Donne published a few manuscripts but no poetry in his lifetime and what has survived to us is all from letters that he wrote to friends; poems that were often copied and passed on, so that there are now something like four thousand copies of his poems, in 260 manuscripts, with no definitive versions of any, and only one poem extant in Donne’s own hand — repeatedly, Rundell proves that writing a biography of Donne is a daunting task. But as Donne lived at the same time as Elizabeth I and Shakespeare and Johannes Kepler (and probably met each), Rundell is able to sketch the outline of Donne’s life by evoking the greater world around him. And from Donne’s beginning in an outlawed Catholic family (he probably saw an uncle hanged and drawn and quartered for his “apostasy”), to his years of striving for a position at Court and his unsanctioned marriage to a young upper class lady (the beloved Anne would provide Donne with twelve children in sixteen years — seven of whom would survive her own death following her last childbirth — and Donne vowed in Anne’s eulogy to never love again, and he did not), there are definitely enough known facts of his life to make him come alive on the page. And throughout, Rundell quotes generously from Donne’s poetry accompanied by her own colourful commentary:

(Sir Philip) Sidney’s woman’s hair is gold, her shoulders ‘be like two white doves’ and her whole person ‘out-beauties’ beauty itself. Donne’s counter-blazon takes that tradition and knifes it in a dark alley. He writes how the sweat of his own mistress’s brow is ‘no sweat drops, but pearl carcanets’, while on his companion’s mistress:

Rank sweaty froth thy mistress’ brow defiles,
Like spèrm’tic issue of ripe menstr’ous boils,
Or like the scum, which, by need’s lawless law
Enforced, Sanserra’s starvèd men did draw
From parboiled shoes and boots, and all the rest
Which were with any sovereign fatness blest.

Honestly, the exuberance of Rundell’s metaphors were half the joy in reading this book:

• Edward Alleyn: the greatest actor of the age, the man who made Faustus his own, Master of the King’s Bears, and possessed, in the etchings, of a beard that looks like he cut it with a rusty ice skate.

• He wore a hat big enough to sail a cat in.

• For all their length, his sermons were never sombre or staid: they were passionate performances, attempts to strike a match against the rough walls of the listeners’ chest cavities.

• To read the full text of a Donne sermon is a little like mounting a horse only to discover that it is an elephant: large and unfamiliar. To modern ears, they are winding, elongated, perambulating things; a pleasure that is also work.

• From failure and penury, to recognition within his lifetime as one of the finest minds of his age; one whose work, if allowed under your skin, can offer joy so violent it kicks the metal out of your knees, and sorrow large enough to eat you.

Again: Super-Infinite was a pleasure to read and Rundell’s admiration of Donne is infectious; I am delighted to have picked this up and can enthusiastically recommend it.

Elizabeth Finch

 

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.