The Beginning of the End of the Story: Departure(s) — Review

What It Is

Departure(s) is Julian Barnes’s declared final book: a brief, formally elusive work that moves between fiction, memoir, literary essay and autobiography while refusing to settle comfortably into any one of them. Barnes’s own website describes it as fiction while immediately complicating what that designation might mean; elsewhere Barnes has been equally explicit that, at eighty, he considers his career as a writer of books finished.

At its centre is the story of Stephen and Jean, two friends Barnes introduces to one another while they are students at Oxford in the 1960s. They fall in love, separate at the end of university and disappear from his life for more than forty years. Then Stephen returns, still preoccupied with Jean, and asks Barnes to help find her. Barnes does rather more than that: he recreates the circumstances of their original meeting and engineers a reunion. They fall in love again, eventually marry, and then discover that a recovered past does not necessarily produce a recoverable life.

Around that story Barnes builds a meditation on memory, narrative identity, ageing, his own incurable but manageable blood cancer, friendship, writing, the elderly Jack Russell Jimmy, and the peculiar moral problem faced by the novelist who turns other people’s lives into material.

The five-part structure — “The Great I AM,” “The Beginning of the Story,” “Manageable,” “The End of the Story,” and “Going Nowhere” — tells us almost everything about the trajectory: selfhood, story, endurance, ending, and whatever remains when the ending refuses to behave like one.

The Review

Julian Barnes has been one of my favourite writers since a young gentleman caller gave me a copy of Flaubert’s Parrot more than twenty years ago.

I could no longer tell you, with any precision, what it was in that book that marked me so indelibly. Only that it did, and that I have adored Barnes ever since.

Which, after reading Departure(s), seems almost suspiciously appropriate.

Memory has retained the attachment while mislaying the evidence.

Barnes has always struck me as one of contemporary English fiction’s great humane ironists: elegant without preciosity, sceptical without cynicism, intellectually exacting yet permanently alert to the ridiculousness of being human. He can puncture self-importance without denying suffering, and write about love without pretending that love makes us wiser than we are.

All of that is here.

But there is something different too.

This is a writer announcing the end of his own story.

Not his death — Barnes has been quite clear that his blood cancer is chronic and presently manageable — but the end of his life as a maker of books. He has said that he feels he has “played all my tunes” and intends Departure(s) to be his last.

That knowledge changes the atmosphere in which one reads it. The book is already concerned with departure, failed endings, memory and the impossibility of imposing narrative closure upon a life; meanwhile the reader is experiencing an actual ending of another kind.

For those of us who have read Barnes for decades, the farewell is therefore not merely his.

I finished the book devastated.

Jean and Stephen: A Story With a Missing Middle

The emotional centre of Departure(s) is Jean and Stephen, but I think it would be a mistake to describe theirs simply as a late-life love story.

It is much stranger than that.

Barnes knows them separately as students at Oxford and introduces them in a café. They fall in love. He observes their relationship from close quarters — meals, studying, laundrettes, the small intimacies through which a couple becomes a couple — and finds himself more emotionally invested in their happiness than he initially understands.

Towards the end of university, Jean and Stephen separately tell Barnes essentially the same thing: they have reached the point at which they must either marry or separate.

Barnes wants marriage.

They choose separation.

And he experiences their decision almost as a personal betrayal.

Then they disappear from his life for more than forty years.

This is the first indication that Barnes is not merely narrating their story. He has already appointed himself to a role within it.

Decades later, Stephen reappears. He has married and divorced; Jean has never married. Stephen still thinks about her and asks Barnes to help him make contact.

Barnes does not simply provide an address or telephone number.

He stages a scene.

He invites Jean back to Oxford and arranges for Stephen to appear at precisely the right moment, recreating something of their original encounter. Jean immediately recognises the novelist’s hand in proceedings. Barnes has not merely reunited two old lovers; he has constructed a narrative event.

It works.

At least for a while.

Stephen and Jean resume their relationship and eventually marry. Barnes becomes best man. The long interruption appears to have been overcome; the beginning has found its ending; life has produced one of those symmetrical arrangements that fiction is forever pretending to discover.

Barnes is delighted.

That is precisely the problem.

Two Ways of Living in Time

Because Stephen and Jean do not understand what has happened to them in the same way.

Stephen is inclined to experience their reunion as completion. He loved Jean when young; he loves her again now; therefore the decades between can be understood as interruption. The ending confirms the beginning.

Jean is much less certain.

She does not necessarily recognise the young woman Stephen remembers as the continuous essence of the woman she has become. To Stephen, their reunion possesses narrative necessity. To Jean, it may be no more than an interesting possibility.

Her unease is captured beautifully when she describes herself as the “answer to a question I was never asked.”

That line is crucial.

Because Departure(s) is not ultimately asking whether Stephen and Jean still love one another.

It is asking whether the self is continuous enough for a recovered love to be recovered at all.

Barnes makes the philosophical framework explicit through Galen Strawson’s 2004 essay “Against Narrativity.” Strawson challenges the increasingly fashionable assumption that psychologically healthy people necessarily understand themselves through a coherent life story. He distinguishes between a more diachronic experience of selfhood — in which the person feels substantial continuity between past, present and future selves — and a more episodic one, in which the individual knows perfectly well that the same human organism existed in the past but does not necessarily experience that former person as the same inner self.

Stephen is recognisably diachronic.

Jean is much closer to episodic.

For Stephen, the twenty-year-old Jean and the older Jean belong to one continuing love story.

For Jean, this is precisely what cannot simply be assumed.

And Barnes places the novelist somewhere awkwardly between them.

Because fiction is almost constitutionally Stephen-like.

The novelist wants continuity.

The novelist notices foreshadowing, recurrence, symmetry, coincidence.

The novelist sees a café in Oxford and then, forty years later, sees an opportunity to return to the same café.

Life supplies accident.

The novelist supplies form.

The Novelist Who Couldn’t Resist

This is where Departure(s) becomes considerably more intellectually interesting than a book about memory or late love.

It begins to interrogate the ethics of narration itself.

Barnes has inserted himself into Jean and Stephen’s lives twice: first by introducing them, then by reintroducing them. When the second relationship fails too, he is forced to consider the possibility that he has behaved towards living people as though they were characters awaiting satisfactory resolution.

Jean understands this tendency immediately. When Barnes engineers the reunion, her accusation is essentially that of a character catching her author manipulating the plot.

And Barnes eventually recognises the problem himself. He wonders whether his investment in narrative coherence has made him parasitic upon their lives — whether the writer’s ability to discern pattern is also a form of appropriation.

This question runs very deep in Barnes.

What exactly does a novelist do to reality?

Experience happens without structure. The novelist remembers it, selects from it, omits, rearranges, emphasises, supplies causality, imposes beginnings and endings.

A life becomes an anecdote.

The anecdote becomes memory.

Memory acquires shape.

Shape begins to resemble story.

And eventually the accident looks inevitable.

Departure(s) is acutely suspicious of that process even while being an exquisite demonstration of it.

Barnes knows perfectly well that Jean and Stephen are more compelling to us because he has given their lives shape.

He also knows that the shape may be his.

That is the ethical unease at the heart of the book.

Memory Is Not an Archive

This is why Barnes begins not with Jean and Stephen but with involuntary autobiographical memory.

The obvious literary ancestor is Proust, and Barnes knows it. The madeleine hovers over the opening pages as the great cultural emblem of involuntary memory: an apparently trivial sensory experience collapses chronological distance and returns the past with a force unavailable to conscious recollection.

But Barnes is both Proustian and suspicious of Proust.

Memory in Departure(s) is not a vault in which the past has been perfectly stored.

It is an activity.

We remember selectively. We suppress. We exaggerate. We repeat stories until the repetition itself replaces the event. Details disappear while feelings remain. Things that may never have happened acquire the psychological status of fact.

The question is therefore not simply: is this memory true?

Barnes asks something more interesting: what kind of truth does a memory acquire because it has survived?

This complicates the Proust comparison.

Proustian involuntary memory offers, however briefly, the intoxicating possibility that lost time can be restored.

Barnes is less trusting.

For him, what returns has already passed through forgetting, self-interest, affection, repetition and time. And in his own case it must pass through one further contaminant:

the mind of a novelist.

This is why Departure(s) feels Proustian without being a miniature Proust.

Both writers understand that the past becomes intelligible retrospectively. But Barnes is much less confident that retrospection restores anything untouched.

Proust searches for lost time.

Barnes examines what we have done to it.

Definitely Not Jules et Jim

And then there is Jules et Jim.

Barnes is emphatic about the comparison precisely because the book seems determined to provoke it.

The names themselves mischievously invite the joke: Julian gives us Jules; Jimmy gives us Jim.

There is a woman, two men, youth, memory, intimacy, decades of emotional entanglement — and Barnes even complicates his supposed position outside the erotic geometry by acknowledging an unsuccessful sexual episode with Jean. Yet he repeatedly resists the idea that Jean, Stephen and Julian can be neatly arranged into Truffaut’s famous triangle.

And rightly so.

Because the Jules et Jim template would itself be another act of narrativisation: taking messy lives and forcing them into a pre-existing cultural story.

Barnes knows what we are doing when we reach for it.

He has been doing the same thing all along.

The funniest part of the allusion is that the most persuasive “Jim” eventually turns out to be Jimmy, the ageing Jack Russell.

Which collapses the grand romantic archetype into something wonderfully Barnesian.

Jimmy

Jimmy is not a charming canine subplot inserted to relieve the heaviness of mortality.

He belongs to the book’s philosophical structure.

After Jean and Stephen’s renewed relationship has run its course, Jimmy eventually comes to live with Barnes. The dog is therefore a surviving material consequence of their story: not metaphorically but literally something that passes out of their shared life and into his.

And Jimmy has one enormous advantage over everyone else in Departure(s).

He has no idea that he is going to die.

Barnes’s official description of the book calls him “enviably oblivious” to his mortality, and the envy matters.

The humans in Departure(s) are condemned to narrative consciousness. They remember themselves, compare present selves with former ones, imagine futures, diagnose patterns, construct endings and worry about what their lives have meant.

Jimmy simply inhabits time.

He does not need Strawson because he has no theory of autobiographical identity.

He does not need Proust because he does not require lost time to be recovered.

He does not need Barnes because he does not know he is a character.

The ageing dog becomes, almost accidentally, the book’s purest example of existence without narrativity.

Of course Barnes cannot leave him that way.

He writes about him.

And so Jimmy too enters narrative.

This is one of the quiet jokes of the book: the novelist may intellectually distrust the impulse to turn life into story, but he cannot stop doing it.

Nor, finally, would we want him to.

“Manageable”

Mortality is everywhere in Departure(s), but it does not enter the book abstractly.

Barnes was diagnosed during the first months of the pandemic with a rare form of blood cancer. It is incurable but currently manageable, requiring continuing treatment. He has spoken publicly about living with it for six years.

“Manageable” is therefore a medical term.

It is also, in Barnes’s hands, a description of life.

This is where his tone becomes indispensable.

There is remarkably little self-pity. Illness is approached with the same mixture of curiosity, pedantry, wit, scepticism and irritation with which Barnes approaches everything else.

He refuses the flattering mythology that illness automatically confers insight.

Cancer has no moral meaning.

The universe has not selected him for instruction.

Disease is not a metaphor sent by fate to improve the novelist’s understanding of existence.

It is biology.

And yet once it happens to a novelist, biology inevitably becomes material.

Barnes observes himself observing himself.

That double consciousness keeps the book from becoming either confessional testimony or stoical performance.

He is afraid.

He is also interested.

The latter does not cancel the former.

Late Style — Without the Grandiosity

It is tempting to call Departure(s) a work of late style, though the term needs some care.

Late style is too often used to mean serenity, concision and wisdom: the great writer finally stripping away ornament and delivering distilled truth.

Barnes is much too suspicious of wisdom for that.

What is genuinely late about Departure(s) is not that contradiction has been resolved but that Barnes no longer seems troubled by leaving it unresolved.

Jean and Stephen do not produce a moral.

Memory does not become reliable.

Illness does not bestow meaning.

The novelist neither repents of making stories nor entirely absolves himself for doing so.

Death remains death.

The five-part structure itself plays with our desire for an orderly final movement. We move from “The Great I AM” through “The Beginning of the Story” to “The End of the Story” — and then Barnes gives us “Going Nowhere.”

The joke is almost metaphysical.

Human beings are creatures desperate for endings, while life offers remarkably few satisfying ones.

And Yet It Is Very Funny

What I most want to insist upon is how funny Departure(s) is.

Barnes has always been one of the wittiest prose stylists in English, and his humour matters particularly here because it prevents mortality from becoming pompous.

The perfectly judged aside.

The parenthesis arriving half a second before solemnity becomes unbearable.

The sudden demolition of an apparently elevated thought.

The recognition that even as we face extinction we remain petty, vain, bureaucratically inconvenienced and physically ridiculous.

This is not comedy used to avoid death.

It is comedy used to see death clearly.

Barnes understands that seriousness and solemnity are not synonyms.

Indeed, solemnity can sometimes be an evasion — an attempt to ennoble what is frightening by giving it ceremonial dignity.

Barnes refuses himself that consolation.

One of the most moving details in the entire book is correspondingly tiny: Jimmy is old and “his feet hurt.” The Guardian critic Alex Clark singled out the same moment as almost unbearably affecting.

Four words.

No metaphysics.

No grand statement about mortality.

An old dog’s feet hurt.

And somehow the whole subject is there.

The Literary Afterlife

There is another kind of mortality circulating through Departure(s) too: the mortality of a literary generation.

Barnes remembers dead friends and contemporaries, among them Christopher Hitchens and Martin Amis, while simultaneously contemplating his own withdrawal from the literary world.

This gives “departure” a cultural as well as personal meaning.

A generation of writers does not disappear at once. It vanishes incrementally: one writer dies, another stops publishing, magazines change, editors retire, conversations lose participants, old arguments become literary history.

Books remain.

But the living culture that produced them does not.

Barnes has spent forty-five years as part of a very particular British literary world, and Departure(s) occasionally feels like an elegy for that ecosystem as much as for the individual people who inhabited it.

There is tenderness in this, but also irritation and anger.

Barnes has not become more reconciled to the world merely because he is preparing to leave it.

That too seems important.

The humane ironist has not mistaken acceptance of mortality for approval of everything that survives him.

The Beginning of the End of the Story

What finally makes Departure(s) so affecting is that all of these strands return to the same problem:

we experience life forwards but understand it backwards, and the backward understanding is never innocent.

Stephen turns his past into destiny.

Jean refuses to.

Barnes turns them both into a story.

Memory rewrites experience.

Illness gives time a different scale.

Jimmy lives without knowing any of this is happening.

And the novelist sits among them all, still arranging, doubting, remembering, correcting, making form from what refuses to possess it.

The book’s deepest triangle is therefore not Jules et Jim.

It is lived life, remembered life and written life.

None perfectly corresponds to the others.

That discrepancy is where literature begins.

And perhaps where Barnes has always lived.

Verdict

I began reading Julian Barnes more than twenty years ago because someone put Flaubert’s Parrot into my hands.

I cannot now remember exactly why I fell in love with it.

The particulars have gone.

The feeling has remained.

After Departure(s), that seems less like a failure of memory than a perfectly Barnesian arrangement.

Barnes has accompanied a considerable portion of my reading life. He has written, again and again, about love, jealousy, France, art, truth, death, memory, history and the stories human beings construct in order to make their own behaviour intelligible to themselves.

Here those preoccupations return one final time, but they are not neatly resolved.

Jean refuses the neatness.

Stephen longs for it.

Jimmy is oblivious to it.

Barnes distrusts it.

And Barnes the novelist cannot stop creating it.

That contradiction may be the most fitting conclusion possible.

He has said that this is his final book, his departure from the long conversation between writer and reader.

If so, the sadness of Departure(s) exceeds the sadness contained within its pages.

One is not simply reading about an ending.

One is experiencing one.

The wit is still there.

The scepticism is still there.

The intellectual curiosity is still there.

And, most of all, the humanity is still there.

Then the story stops.

I finished Departure(s) in tears.

If this is Julian Barnes’s final bow, it is a magnificent one.

★★★★★