Julian Barnes presents Departure(s) as his final book

Julian Barnes tells us that Departure(s) is his final book, the last instalment of a writing career spanning 45 years across novels, short stories, memoir, essays, biography, travel writing, translation and some pseudonymous detective fiction. The book collects many of those preoccupations, the reviewer notes, with past works turning up “obliquely or overtly” as stylistic or thematic echoes.

Barnes treats two kinds of leave taking: the end of a career and “the departure without subsequent arrival” of death. The voice, the review says, is controlled and distinctive—rational, romantic and rueful—and the book mixes fiction and autobiography, at times daring the reader to disbelieve (“google that if you wish”).

Central to the narrative is a triangle involving Jean and Stephen: Barnes recounts introducing Jean to Stephen at Oxford, watching their youthful love flourish and dissolve, and reintroducing them in later life only to see the pattern repeat. The review reports the book’s ground keeps shifting, leaving questions about Barnes’s responsibility for the failed reunion and describing him at one point as “a seedy marriage-broker”.

The book also addresses his diagnosis with incurable but manageable blood cancer at the start of lockdown, treated with a mix of bathetic humour and tenderness in small domestic details.

Key Topics

Culture, Julian Barnes, Departure(s), Oxford, Blood Cancer, Talking It Over