An Article about Julian Barnes

Cool, clean man of letters
Sunday, June 29, 2003
By Nadine O'Regan
Julian Barnes has a voice that could cut through ice. Sharp, crisp and quintessentially English, his are the kind of tones that remind you why Hollywood regularly casts Englishmen as villains in its films.

Happily, Barnes is no natural born baddie. This is a man who exclaims with delight when he sees his shortbread biscuits arriving at our table in Dublin's Fitzwilliam Hotel, and kindly refrains from commenting on your correspondent's appalling efforts to pronounce the names of his favourite French authors.

Barnes is both terribly nice and terribly clever. Though willing to converse about his own work, he is just as interested in the creations of others. He is in Ireland to give a reading at the DublinWriters' Festival, and has spent the morning visiting the Francis Bacon studio and the Writers' Museum, where he chanced upon the exciting new word `stuccodore'.

"Wonder if I could use that?" he muses.

Barnes has managed to pack more culture into his weekend trip than most Dubliners manage in a lifetime. It makes a certain kind of sense, then, that the 57-year-old's most famous book is actually a tangled-up meditation on another writer's work. Flaubert's Parrot tells the story of a man obsessed with the French author Gustave Flaubert.

As the narrator attempts to track down the stuffed parrot that once sat on Flaubert's desk, he relays snippets of information about the author and analyses his prose. In this way the book combines fiction with literary criticism.

In France, Flaubert's Parrot won the prestigious Prix Medicis, and brought Barnes to the attention of a new audience. But the novel was his third full-length work of fiction, and Barnes has published six more since it came out in 1984. Does he mind that he is still best known for Flaubert's Parrot?

"No," he says. "I remember once seeing a band wrapped around a new book by one of those very respectable, middle-ranking British novelists. It said, `His 21st novel', and I thought: `That's all they can say because he has never written a book that anyone has ever heard of.' It was a case of: here's another novel by someone whose other novels you haven't read.

"Kingsley Amis was once asked if Lucky Jim was an albatross around his neck, and he said it was better than not having a bloody albatross at all. That's my perspective."

In a few months, Barnes's new collection of short stories will be published. It has the rather enigmatic title, The Lemon Table.

"In Helsinki," he explains, "at the turn of the previous century, there was a table at a particular restaurant to which the composer Sibelius used to go. It was known as the `lemon table' because the lemon was the Chinese symbol of death, and when you went to the lemon table, you were obliged to talk about death. The late 19th century generation thought and talked about death a lot more than we do."

When asked if he contemplates death frequently, Barnes nods. "I've been thinking about it for a very long time. I think about it most days of my life. I have since I was 16."

He smiles. "I don't get anywhere with it. I don't come up with any answers. But I suppose it must inform the way I live and write."

Is he religious? "I'm not. My position is: I don't believe in God, but I miss Him. Sometimes, when you see great religious art or you listen to a great choral work, which is a religious work, you think how wonderful it would have been to have been alive when these things were being painted or composed, and to believe it all."

Barnes is aware that people often become more religious as they grow older, but he is certain this will not happen to him.

"It's feeble to become religious because you're afraid of death approaching," he says. "The idea that God created the world in which we live, given its inequalities and injustices, is incredible. If He were an unjust God and He created the world, on the other hand, that might make more sense."

This is typical Barnes: logical almost to a fault. Brought up in a family of schoolteachers, the Leicester-born author is a meticulous user of careful language, who always pushes arguments through to their rational conclusions. This has frequently resulted in him being characterised as cold or snooty.

His friends feel this impression is essentially inaccurate. "He has very high standards," the writer Jancis Robinson has said, "by which I don't mean he worries whether or not the napkins are folded correctly. He wants every- thing to be good quality, whether that is a decision, a moral stance or a hunk of beef."

Barnes also possesses a wry, highly-refined sense of humour. During the war in Iraq, he wrote a powerful article for the Guardian, attacking the actions of the Bush administration.
He was taken aback to discover that the angry letters he soon began receiving were not in response to this piece, but instead to a cooking column he had penned for the same newspaper.

"I didn't get hate mail about Iraq, but I got hate mail about Nigel Slater," he laughs. "I wrote a column saying that a recipe of his didn't work. Not since I attacked Torvill and Dean in my Observer television column have I had such a vituperative response. Nigel Slater is obviously a domestic god, and if this recipe didn't work, it was because I was incompetent."

Barnes may be many things, but incompetent is not one of them. The author maintains an almost prodigious work rate, writing newspaper articles, essays, short stories and novels. He is diligent and extremely clear-headed, never taking an advance prior to the publication of one of his novels, for fear it would have a debilitating effect on his writing.

"It could be psychologically dangerous," he says. "Whenever I read about three-book advances, I always think: `Well, they know they've got X pounds guaranteed, so isn't this going to make them lazier?' "

Is he ever envious of the large advances earned by some debut novelists?

"No," he says. "You raise an eyebrow. You th i n k: `T hey wouldn't pay this to a middle-aged man with a beard.' It puts an awful lot of pressure on the novelist, which I'm not sure is right. I don't feel envious."

It might not be the best strategy for Barnes to complain to his agent, however. Pat Kavanagh is not just his literary representative, but also his wife. Does this unusual situation ever cause problems between them?

"Not from my point of view, because I think she's the best agent in the world. But she knows that people know that she's asking for money for her husband, so I think she would be happier if someone else represented me. But it really has given us very few problems."

Presumably, this is due to the high quality of Barnes's output. As a novelist, he ranks alongside Martin Amis, Ian McEwan and Salman Rushdie as one of the great innovators of English literary fiction. He may have matured into something of an elder statesman, but his passion for his work continues unabated. Retirement, for Barnes, is not an option.

"I don't think I'd be happy if I just stopped writing," he says. "Writing has become necessary to me. It is a necessity as well as a pleasure."

How would the author like to be remembered?

Barnes mulls over this for a moment, then grins. "I hope when my obituary is written, it doesn't say: `He wrote 21 novels whose names we can't remember'."

©The Sunday Business 2005, Thomas Crosbie Media TCH

URL: http://archives.tcm.ie/businesspost/2003/06/29/story382420037.asp

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