Books
Death sentence
by Lydia Wevers
Julian Barnes muses on mortality: the particulars as well as the big question.
Thirty-four pages into Nothing to Be Frightened of, Julian Barnes announces sternly: “This is not, by the way ‘my autobiography’. Nor am I ‘in search of my parents’.” Indeed, it is not an autobiography in any conventional way, though some readers might note that he does in fact search out his parents. What this 250-page book is really about is death.
Barnes, like Kingsley Amis, Philip Larkin and John Betjeman, turns out to be “death-haunted”. And like many of us in that generation born somewhere around World War II, he is also irreligious. Nothing to Be Frightened of opens with what is clearly going to become an instant entry in the Oxford Book of Quotations: “I don’t believe in God, but I miss him.” Barnes goes on to explain that Missing God is rather like Being English, a feeling roused by attack. The “attack” he is under is an ancient one – fear of death.
Much of Nothing to Be Frightened of reports a discussion over time with Barnes’ brother, Jonathan, a philosopher who robustly shoots down any existential longings expressed by his younger sibling. It is also an extended and discontinuous description of his parents – how they lived as well as how they died: his father, a French teacher, who took a long time about it and lost most things on the way; and his mother, whom he didn’t like because she controlled everything, especially talking, but who dispatched herself far more efficiently.
Woven into this digressive, chatty, philosophical essay are coronets of little stories: about himself as a boy, about Gustave Flaubert, Jules Renard, Alphonse Daudet and Emile Zola, about his friends, other writers, composers (Dodie Smith, Somerset Maugham, Ravel, Montaigne, Richard Dawkins), about music, medicine, sport and his grandparents.
He discusses the particulars he fears about death as well as what it is he fears – death or dying? Extinction or the wasting of the brain? Like lapsing into embarrassing, inappropriate behaviour you cannot prevent. The example he uses is a courteous literary scholar whose descent into senility sees him spouting extreme sexual fantasies at his wife.
Barnes’ musings on the big question of Being or Not-Being (there are lots of capitals in this book) aren’t as gripping as the accumulation of riveting detail on how particular people actually died, their modes of declining, and how they managed expiry.
The agnostic Maugham, for example – before he declined into “vindictiveness, monkeyglands and hostile will-making” – summoned the philosopher AJ Ayer to “reassure him that death was indeed final, and that nothing and nothingness followed it”. Just as well.
Nothing to Be Frightened of is studded with aphorisms, many of which are memorable and new – to me, at any rate – like Henry James, who defined life as a “predicament before death”, or Renard, who said that to have a “horror of the bourgeois was bourgeois”, but there is an air of over-egging the pudding about it.
Perhaps because Barnes is a novelist and not a philosopher, the interest of this book lies in the way his scholarship, biography, experience and storytelling produce a narrative about death as deaths, the many particular ways in which people die and what we think and feel about that.
It is at its best at its most autobiographical – recalling his childhood, the differences between the brothers (there is a rich lode of sibling observation in this book), or the grandparents Reading Their Diaries (aloud), in which accounts of the same mundane day differed wildly.
Barnes’ disquisition on death, which is learned, clever, thoughtful and researched, is most engaging when, like Daudet, he is perhaps not bidding farewell to, but remembering, “wife, family, the things of the heart”.
Lydia Wevers is director of the Stout Research Centre for New Zealand Studies at Victoria University in Wellington.
NOTHING TO BE FRIGHTENED OF, by Julian Barnes (Jonathan Cape, $59.99).
