British. Born in Leicester, 19 January 1946. Educated at City of london School, 1957-64; Magdalen College, Oxford, 1964-68, B.A. (honours) in modern languages 1968. Editorial assistant, Oxford English Dictionary supplement, 1969-72, and television critic, 1977-81, New Statesman, London; deputy literary editor, Sunday Times, London, 1980-82. Since 1982, television critic, The Observer, London. Contributing editor, New Review, London, 1977- 78. Recipient: Maugham Award, 1981; Faber Memorial Prize, 1985. Agent: A.D. Peters, 10 Buckingham Street, London WC2N 6BU, England.
Publications
Novels
Metroland. London, Cape, 1980; New York, St. Martin's Press,
1981.
Before She Met Me. London, Cape, 1982.
Flaubert's Parrot. London, Cape, 1984; New York, Knopf,
1985.
Duffy, London, Cape, 1980.
Fiddle City. London, Cape, 1981.
Putting the Boot In. London, Cape, 1985.
Uncollected Short Story as Dan Kavanagh
"The 50p Santa," in Time Out (London), 19 December 1985-1 January 1986.
Julian Barnes's wry and accomplished first novel,
Metroland,
charts the progress to adulthood of its narrator, Christopher Lloyd, and
the divergence of him and his abiding friend, Toni Barbarowski, from
kindred spirits to near-opposites. In 1963,
as adolescents, they are would-be bohemians: their heroes are the French
symbolists, their watchwords "écraser l'infame" and "épater
la bourgeoise." By 1977, Chris is married with a young daughter.
He has a well-paid job with a publisher of popular reference books.
And he has returned to the "bourgeois dormitory" where he grew
up: "Metroland," that "thin corridor" of outer suburbia connected
to London by the Metropolitan Line. Toni, by contrast, is an
academic and author heavily involved in "street politics". He lives
with a girl "in the least fashionable part of the borough of
Kensington he could find." Chris claims to have attained maturity
and happiness; Toni considers him a complacent philistine. Chris's
version seems the more immediately persuasive, not least because
Toni cuts such an unattractive, unexemplary figure. He retains the
preocuppation with image of their adolescence and youth: his life
appears to be a sequence of radical-chic gestures. Chris, on the
other hand, has apparently acquired the confidence to be himself,
has outgrown the need to strike prose. But Metroland is more
subtle than that. In fact, Tonis's criticisms are not entirely unjustified,
and Chris does experience sneaking reservations about certain aspects
of his development. For Chris, growwing up has not been a straightforward
process of either education or corruption, but a combination- difficult
to distinguish-of both. Barnes's novels are linked by Francophilia, notably
a passion
for French literature, and preocupation with marriage and
fidelity. The former permeates the first two parts of Metroland-the
second of which sees Chris in Paris-while the latter comprises
a bone of contention between Chris, faithful husband, and the promiscuous
Toni in the third.
In Before She Met Me, though, the latter overshadows all
else: Graham Hendrick, an historian, becomes obsessed with
the lovers his second wife, Ann, had before him. His fixation
begins when he sees Ann, once a bit-part film actress, in a
"five-year-old British comedy flop." She admits that her lover
in the film was also, briefly, her actual lover. Thereafter,
increasingly consumed by retrospective jealousy, Graham probes
Ann's sexual history, pestering her for names, dates, recollections.
She keeps secret only her long-gone affair with the novelist,
Jack lupton: he is Graham's friend and confidante. Meanwhile,
Graham frequents backwater cinemas to witness Ann's fleeting appearances,
to see the actors who were her onscreen and/or offstage lovers. He
drinks more; he will take holidays only in places she has not
visited with other men; his dreams are lurid exaggerations of her
past "adulteries". Finally, by analysing some of Lupton's novels
(which borrow freely from life), Graham uncovers Ann's affair with
him. Mistakenly, though, he believes it to be still going on. This
provokes the blood-letting which closes the book- disappointingly. Dealing
with a little-explored contemporary subject-the problem of jealousy
in an age of sexual freedom-Barnes constructs an authoritative portrait
of a cracking personality only to embrace finally the all-too-convenient
(and, in this case, melodramatic) device of death. Before She
Met Me remains, though, a praiseworthy novel, memorable also
for Barnes's deadly portrayal of the emotional war of attrition waged
by Graham's first wife during and after their marriage. Geoffrey
Braithwaite, the retired general practitioner and widower who narrates
Flaubert's
Parrot, is a man obsessed, too. A fervent admirer of the eponymous
author, he wants to know everything about the ma behind the
books. The tittle alludes to his attempt to discover which of two
stuffed parrots was the one Flaubert kept on his desk during the
writing of "Un coeur simple." Investigation, though, confuses rather
tahn resolves the issue: in fact, the parrot could have been any
one of fifty. And if, Braithwaite asks, it proves impossible to discover
the facts about this one small thing, how can we ever "seize the past"?
Certainly, truth-apropos of questions both large and small-is throughout
elusive and incomplete: a chapter devoted to considering the colour of
Emma Bovary's eyes reaches no firm conclusion, for instance, whilein another-a
self-contained twist-in-the-tail story-a cache of newly-unearthed letters
providing definite proof of Flaubert's true relationship with the shadowy
Juliet Herbert are burned before Braithwaite's and others'-of regarding
Flaubert and
his work, all half-truths (or less) that never amount to a whole.Graham
Hendrick's obsession was destructive; Braithwaite's, conversely, offers
solace: his quest for Flaubert distracts him from the subject of his beloved
late wife, a compulsive adultress of whose "secret life" he knows nothing
beyond its existence and whose suicide he cannot understand. Seeking to
know her instead would not only be a painful and possibly (given Graham's
example) dangerous task, but an intractable one also:
My wife: someone I feel I understand less well than a foreign writer
dead for a hundred years... Books say: she did this because. Life says:
she did this. Books are where things are explained to you; life is
where things aren't. I'm not surprised some people prefer books.
Serious and playful, often simultaneously, Flaubert's Parrot is a tour de force of fiction, criticism, and biography combined. Admittedly, there are occasional longueurs, and Braithwaite's character is rather insubstantial. Furthermore, some of its devices-which include a codexam-paper and a glossary of conventional wisdom on Flaubertian matters-can seem flashy on second reading. But for all that, it is a thoroughly absorbing work.Barnes's "Dan Kavanagh" novels are detective stories featuring Nick Duffy, a bisexual ex-policeman. The earliest, Duffy, is the most successful, compensating for an unexceptional plot with its semi-humorous protagonist and an evocation of Soho's "Golden Mile" praised for its realism by the reviewer for Police World. Despite some fascinating glimpses into the arcana of smuggling through airports, Fiddle City is less impressive, while putting the Boot In is an outright disappointment: a lacklustre picture of lower division football coupled with a familiar plot.
©David Montrose From Contemporary Novelists. -4th ed.-(Contemporary writers) 1.Novelists. English 20th century. St James Press, Britain: 1986
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