- This latest by Julian Barnes is a novel of ideas, ancient and modern. It's definitely challenging, but if you're at all interested in how the West developed as a culture and society over over the last few millennia then you will find it absorbing. I certainly did.
- There are three sections to the book, one and three telling the story of inspiring academic Elizabeth Finch and her students' reaction to her, and section two morphing into a history of a fourth century Roman Emperor, Julian the Apostate, who profoundly influenced her thinking. It's rich in ideas and insights, is charming, and in fact delicious.
- Elizabeth is a heavy smoker, she suffers migraines, and is unmarried. She's stylish, conservatively dressed, charming, often cheeky, and her manner droll and wry. She also has poise and exudes immense authority. Her course is ‘Culture and Civilisation’. She obliged us - simply by example - to seek and find within ourselves a centre of seriousness. (A few reviewers have suggested Barnes has modelled her on English author Anita Brookner, a good friend of his. This may or not be the case but it is irrelevant).
- The narrator of the novel, Neil, is one of her students. He's in his mid-thirties, is a former actor, mushroom grower, and hospitality worker, and now after two failed marriages is at a bit of a loss. After graduating, he meets Elizabeth ('EF') for lunch a few times a year over a twenty year period. Until her death. She leaves Neil her papers and library. He remains fascinated by her, but as a narrator he is supremely unreliable.
- Who actually was Julian the Apostate? He was the last pagan emperor of Rome. He detested the way Christianity became the dominant religious tradition across the empire, displacing the more liberating and joyous pagan traditions. The old gods of Greece and Rome were gods of light and joy…whereas these new Christians obeyed a God of darkness, of pain and servitude…the pagan gods were conquered by the pale Galilean. Julian died in battle at the young age of 31.
- Neil reads EF's notebooks, full of memories, arguments, quotes, scribbles and jottings. Julian also was a frequent scribbler who left a large written legacy.
- Neil gives us Julian’s history in fullsome detail, much of it boring and pretty irrelevant. There's too much about his reign, battles, campaigns and enemies. But Neil’s reflections, Barnes’s probably, are thrilling. What if he had ruled for another thirty years, marginalising Christianity year by year…And at least he ranges widely, quoting scholars and commentators down the ages: Lorenzo de’ Medici, Montaigne, Milton, Montesquieu, Voltaire (Julian was ‘a dazzling precursor to the Enlightenment’), Edward Gibbon, Ibsen, Swinburne, and….Hitler.
- After her retirement she was invited to give a lecture by the London Review of Books. Neil was present, as were many former students and prominent intellectuals. Of course she focussed on Julian and his anti-Christian writings. Unfortunately the tabloid press had a field day. They ridiculed her for celebrating an ancient philosophical lightweight, now largely forgotten. A load of bollocks according to one reviewer. One former student called her ‘an amateur…irrelevant’. Has Neil been living in a fool’s paradise regarding her? Did he get it all wrong, as he got most of his life choices wrong?
- Barnes has alway been a novelist of ideas and socio-political issues, something he shares with Ian McEwan. Which is why I've long been an avid fan of both. Give his novel a go, if you're tempted. You won't regret it.
(By the way this is a beautiful production of a hard cover book by publisher Jonathan Cape UK. It's thankfully printed in Australia by Griffin Press, as UK printers are generally third rate. They rarely get the binding right)
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