Julian Barnes’s search for an ending

“Two things to mention at this stage,” writes Julian Barnes early in his new book, interrupting a typically companionable discussion of memory – his great theme – to issue a brief housekeeping notice:

1) There will be a story – or a story within the story – but not just yet.
2) This will be my last book.

Hopping timelines between the 1960s, the 2010s and the pandemic, Departure(s) is a richly layered autofiction mixing medical memoir and thwarted love story.

The medical narrative describes how Barnes developed a skin condition that defied investigation – peeling swathes on his legs, hundreds of hard spots on his back – and, several appointments down the line, was recognised in 2020 as a symptom of a rare blood cancer, incurable but manageable, “like… life”, he quips. Wrapped around this is an account of the 40-year fallout from a troubled romance between Stephen and Jean, two friends Barnes – or his fictional avatar – brought together as a student at Oxford in the 60s: for him, very much unswinging (no drugs, barely any drink and just about as little sex, twice getting into bed with girls but doing nothing).

Both now dead – one reason for the shy plural of the title – they married one another in later life, having been reunited by Barnes about 40 years after their parting post-finals, only to go wrong again for reasons too knotty to untangle here (Jean finds Stephen not passionate enough, then too passionate in the wrong way).

Barnes promises the story is true “with several caveats” – among them his decision to pseudonymise the couple, having promised he’d never write about them: “And yes, I follow you: if I broke that oath, how dependable is my promise to you of authenticity?”

With wide-ranging references to Proust, Hieronymus Bosch, Jimmy Carter and Soviet neuropsychology, and thoughts about the consciousness of dogs (at one point, Barnes ends up inheriting Jean’s jack russell), Departure(s) is told in the voice Barnes coined in Flaubert’s Parrot (1984). Artfully constructed to seem casually conversational, it braids erudite essayism and fiction, and every line is turned inside out with qualifications. The book centres on the kind of triangular relationship that has preoccupied Barnes since Talking It Over (1991), and is haunted by the past, as in the Booker-winning The Sense of an Ending (2011), as well as the spectre of male inadequacy: Barnes is an underrated writer of masculinity; a specialist not in swagger, but jealousy, bungling, shrinkage.

The timelines move between the 1960s, when Stephen and Jean first get together; the 2010s, when Barnes – now famous – reconnects with them; and the early days of Covid, when he’s being treated for blood cancer. In the middle period, Jean tells Barnes: “This hybrid stuff you do – I think it’s a mistake. You should do one thing or the other.” He replies: “I don’t mind you not liking my books, but you are mistaken if you think I don’t know exactly what I’m up to when I write them.”

No one ever doubted it. The question is: why do it? Part of the answer seems to be Barnes’s interest in the extra little voltage any piece of writing gets from transgression. He relishes crossing a boundary of genre – putting into a novel a sentence such as: “In early 16th-century northern European painting, there was a popular sub-theme entitled…” – or crossing an ethical line: promising Stephen and Jean’s real-life analogues he’d never write about them and doing it anyway. When Barnes says late on that “this isn’t a novel”, we know he’s playing us to some degree, but there’s still a frisson for the reader.

At the same time, when Barnes is defending his practice to Jean, we can’t but help feel he’s talking more to us than to her. The uneasy three-way relationship defining this part of the book – whereby Barnes ends up confidant to Stephen and Jean separately as their relationship falters anew – is a matter of mind rather than heart or gut, even in its most heightened moments.

When Barnes discreetly prods Jean for details of her sex life with Stephen, she says: “I’ll tell you the truth, and don’t you ever fucking use it, not even deeply disguised in some novel where I appear as Jeanette and Stephen is Stuart.” For flesh-and-blood characters, they collude a little too eagerly in the book’s metafictional premise. “This isn’t some scenario you’ve invented,” she tells him.

Barnes carefully cultivates a sense of imprecision around his attempts to write these characters. At first, he isn’t even sure which tense to use: “Stephen was – is – was...” When the friends, parted after Oxford, resume contact 40 years later, Barnes writes: “I found that I missed him. Is that right?” It’s unclear to whom the question is addressed. Trying to describe Jean, he says: “She headed straight towards things, and ideas, and people; she took them on, rather than being taken on herself – does that make sense?”

If these on-off lovers really are drawn from people Barnes knew, perhaps the haziness serves another purpose besides demonstrating the fallibility of memory and language. Either way, the relationship crisis can’t help feel less urgent than the medical one, despite its less emotionally charged tenor. “I was lying on my front with my trousers half-loosened, as the registrar prepared for a bone-marrow biopsy.”

It’s the sort of sentence that makes you sit up straighter. There’s more comedy in this strand, too. In the early days of Covid, Barnes imagines overwhelmed hospital staff: “They see this old geezer and are coming down on the side of straight to ‘end-of-life care’ when one of them notices that I am wearing a lapel badge. It reads: BUT I WON THE BOOKER PRIZE. And I am reprieved. Unless the gesture looks like an attempt to pull rank, in which case... well, I would never find out.” (In reality, a doctor rescues him from the waiting room in A&E because she recognises his name, “which made me glad the hospital was in bookish Hampstead”.)

Around the twin poles of the novel, all kinds of material flows, serious and trivial. It records Barnes’s final communication from his late friend Martin Amis, who died of throat cancer in 2023. How Barnes likes to read relationship advice in the Guardian, and how he was taught maths by the father of the future England cricket captain Mike Brearley, with whom he compared notes in adulthood.

We also learn in passing that Barnes, who turns 80 this month, is nearly 800,000 words into the diary that he has been keeping for more than half a century: just one of very many reasons to hope that he’s wrong about Departure(s) being his last book.

Departure(s) by Julian Barnes is published by Jonathan Cape (£18.99). Order a copy from The Observer Shop for £17.09. Delivery charges may apply

Photography by Alamy