What makes us who we are? Genetics, parenting, climate, geography – Elizabeth Finch lists the usual suspects before naming “the elephant in the room, trumpeting away: history. Her goal, and Julian Barnes’s, in this strange, elusive novel, is to redirect our attention to this elephant: to the fact that we, our habits, our thoughts, are the products of events that occurred hundreds, even thousands of years ago – events that we misconstrue if we remember them at all.
But who is Elizabeth Finch? Neil, the narrator, spends much of the novel attempting to answer this question. A failed actor, recently divorced, Neil has taken Elizabeth Finch’s course in culture and civilisation, and become besotted with her, or rather with her ideas. Initially, Elizabeth Finch – Neil refers to her throughout by her full name or her initials – beguiles us too. With her tweeds and tartans, bracing manner, and penchant for esoteric rambles to a captive audience, she has a touch, in the early pages, of Muriel Spark’s Jean Brodie.
But although her course promises “rigorous fun”, the emphasis is decidedly on the rigour, and unlike Spark’s novel, where we see the effects of the teacher on her class, and vice versa, here the students are ghostly figures, whose contributions serve principally to set up more wisdom from EF. (“You mentioned monocultures . . . I can’t see what you’ve got against them. They’re surely a sign of efficiency, of successful central planning.”) Life beyond the lecture hall is literally non-existent: this is emphatically not a campus novel.
Role of chance
Instead what we get – first in her lectures, later from her notebooks – are EF’s ideas. These centre on the instability of history, the role of chance in shaping events that come to be seen as inevitable. A key figure for her is Julian the Apostate, “the last pagan emperor of Rome, who attempted to turn back the disastrous flood tide of Christianity”. Julian’s death aged 31 was “the moment when history went wrong”, when the diverse, (relatively) enlightened civilisations of the ancients were usurped by an aggressive, anti-rational monotheism. EF believes that a line can be drawn from the rise of the early church, with its intolerance and exclusivity, all the way to Brexit.
These thoughts are certainly not without interest, but it’s hard to know what to do with them. As we never step outside the classroom, we never see her lessons drive any change, even in the narrator’s own life. Instead he tells us repeatedly how he admires her and how we should too. One can’t help wondering if this insistence on EF’s specialness, which comes to seem relentless, stems from the author’s anxiety about his project. If we don’t believe that EF is special, why should we want to read an anthology of her thoughts?
Things get stranger, considerably, in the second part. It’s 20 years later; EF has died, and willed Neil her books and papers. Finding a reading list among them, he realises that EF intends him to write about Julian, to make up for his failure to submit a term paper 20 years before. The resulting essay is presented in full: 60 pages (one-third of the novel) about the life of the fourth-century emperor, and what might have been had he not been killed by a stray spear in Persia.
Left turn
This comes as something of a left turn, to be sure. Nevertheless, it’s tremendously entertaining, as well as a brilliant embodying of the novel’s theme. Julian, an oddball famed for his modesty, tolerance and devotion to philosophy – signified by a (then very unfashionable) beard – is a compelling figure, and a strong case is made that the world would be radically different – better – if he had lived. “Perhaps no need for a Renaissance, since the old Graeco-Roman ways would be intact, and the great scholarly libraries undestroyed.”
Barnes has always enjoyed testing the boundary between fact and fiction, and here he pushes it to the limit. In the final part, however, Neil accepts that no matter how much he learns he will never fully understand EF, any more than he does Julian; that a human life is not something that can be understood. This acceptance brings some of the warmest moments in the book, and, as Barnes the chronicler of ideas steps aside, and Barnes the novelist takes over, a series of haunting images.
Cheap cigarettes in a fancy case, a mysterious embrace outside a station, a palm-print fading on a bar-room table: these are things that his heroine, for all her brilliance, might let go by, yet they are the ones that stay with Neil, and us – the radiant, unexplainable fragments of a life.
