This article is taken from the April 2026 issue of The Critic. To get the full magazine why not subscribe? Get five issues for just £5.
It’s hard to think of another writer who has covered more ground in the past half-century than Julian Barnes. Michael Frayn, perhaps. As novelist, essayist, gourmand and lover of paintings, Barnes has made a singular mark.
His writing is elegant, with no trace of ornamentation. It is clever, yet he never locks readers out. It is witty, but the humour is not indulgent. Here is a sane man with a clear mind, and modest with it.
Although he has won awards, including the David Cohen, which honours a lifetime’s work, Barnes would probably agree with Charles Ives that “prizes are for little boys, and I’m a grown-up”. The man who wrote Arthur & George, Letters from London, and The Man in the Red Coat has always stimulated the imagination of his readers. Their gratitude is the only prize that good writers should covet.
Now, in his 81st year, he has chosen to close his innings with Departure(s), another of his “hybrids”, blending fiction with a rumination on places and people. It is about the unlocking of memory, as most imaginative writing is. “Truth comes in various forms,” he says. “Memory is identity.”
Never one to reach for a foghorn, he prefers writing to talking about writing. So it was good to hear a rare interview on This Cultural Life, Radio 4’s weekly wallow in the hinterland of somebody interesting — and, occasionally, it must be said, not that interesting. Prompted by John Wilson, a good listener, Barnes took us back to a French holiday as a 12-year-old in the family’s Triumph Mayflower, “the ugliest car ever made”.
Foreign adventures were rarer in the Fifties than they became a decade later. British drivers saluted one another on French roads, as if to say “you got here, too”.
“Go and get a newspaper,” his language teacher father told him on that first morning in Normandy, after supplying the vocabulary the young Barnes needed. It proved to be the beginning of a love affair with France and its literature; that, and reading Madame Bovary at 16. Two decades later it was Flaubert’s Parrot, a homage to Flaubert, which carried his name across the world.
At school, bored with Monday manoeuvres in the Combined Cadet Force — “dressing up in uniform” — he read Dostoevsky. Russian writers prompted another awakening. Crime and Punishment, he realised, “was more about real life than running through the gorse as a soldier”.
After three years at Magdelen College there was an immersion in lexicography with the Oxford English Dictionary supplement (his brief was “sports and dirty words”) and some journalism.
He succeeded Clive James as the Observer’s television reviewer, and shared a berth at the New Statesman with Chris Hitchens and Martin Amis. Then, in 1980, he became a novelist when Jonathan Cape accepted Metroland.
That was down to Liz Calder, who picked up the manuscript from a slush pile, pronounced it “salvageable”, and instructed him to make it tighter. In 1983 he found himself on Granta’s list of “writers to watch” and, like others similarly anointed, swiftly made good on his promise. Eventually he won the Booker Prize in 2011 for The Sense of an Ending, a good book though not necessarily his finest.
There has been sadness along the way. Pat Kavanagh, his agent wife, died in 2008. Friends who sought to draw him back to their company took him to Covent Garden, to hear Gluck’s opera, Orpheus and Eurydice. Barnes was bowled over by its famous aria, known in English as “What is Life?” “It’s the greatest song of grief I know,” he said.
This kind of exchange is what radio does so well, when the parties are aligned in purpose
“Consolation?” asked Wilson. “Corroboration,” he replied. Last year he married again and carries everybody’s best wishes into the autumn of his years. It’s a shame there won’t be any more books but he can rest easy. He’s done his bit.
This kind of exchange is what radio does so well, when the parties are aligned in purpose. We were permitted to eavesdrop on two intelligent people sharing a civilised conversation about interesting things, possibly sustained by something red and sapid and French.
The world of books has become a battleground, where ignorant armies clash by night. Like much else, you might say. Writers are now probed for their social and political views as though they were tribunes of the people. Yet, as Howard Jacobson wrote recently, “no good novelist was ever an ideologue”.
Barnes has never sought a tube of greasepaint and a follow-spot. His respect for readers has always been evident. In life, as in print, he has the voice of a tolerant man, for whom a book is a living link with the best of what has gone before.
Flaubert said we should read in order to live. Barnes has lived up to that precept, and achieved things that must have seemed as distant as the moon when he was growing up in Metroland, looking for Leicester City’s results. Chapeau.
