Poor old Mr Barnes
by Frankie MacMillan
Julian Barnes's characters are a cultured lot. While having their hair
cut, they reflect on the social history of the barber shop; they write plays,
compose music, are well travelled (lapsing into foreign phrases at the drop of
a hat), are epicures of fine food and can even tell you that the lowly lemon represents
the Chinese symbol of death.
But old age is no respecter of class, and the many elderly characters in
this collection all suffer in different ways:senile dementia, bitterness, the ravages of love.
Humour lightens the elegiac tone. “Vigilance” begins: “It all started
when I poked the German.” This upbeat story is about the schemes of a gay
concert-goer to put an end to audience noise – rustling, coughing, even
groping. Flashes of affectionate humour are also present in “Knowing French”.
Here, an elderly woman in an “old folkery” begins a
lively correspondence with Barnes. We don’t have Barnes’s letters to her
because she hid them in the fridge, and they were destroyed after her death.
Barnes’s wry observations and vivid prose also help counter the morbidity.
In “The Fruit Cage”, the narrator remembering scenes from his childhood: “On
Monday the house would throb to
our washing machine,
which used to crab itself berserkly across the
kitchen floor, howling and buckling, before sending, at deranged intervals,
gallons of hot grey water along its fat beige tubes.”
His characters refuse to give up the passions of youth, but their desire
often conflicts with a growing inability to pursue those passions. From the
narrator in “The Fruit Cage”: “Why make the assumption the heart shuts down
alongside the genitals?” Though we get the feeling that Barnes thinks this
pursuit of love and sex by the elderly is often a foolish indulgence, the
characters never fall into caricature. Rather, they embrace extremes of feeling,
cruel and tender, coarse and civilised at the same time.
Stylistically, Barnes’s work has often been seen as either difficult or
nonconformist. In his famous novel Flaubert’s Parrot, the writing blurred the
boundaries between fiction, criticism and essay. In this collection, the
stories are traditional in form – with occasional authorial intrusion. In “
The Lemon Table is occupied with fear of death, loss of love – and a
decline in talent. So far, though, Barnes’s writing is as perceptive, witty and
wise as ever.
© 2003-2008 APN Holdings NZ Ltd
URL: http://www.listener.co.nz/issue/3341/artsbooks/1997/poor_old_mr_barnes.html
Articles [1] [2] [3] [4] [5] [6] [7] [9] [10] [11]
Página creada y actualizada por grupo "mmm".
Para cualquier cambio, sugerencia, etc.
contactar con: fores@uv.es
© a.r.e.a./Dr.Vicente Forés López
© Tirca Mihaela
Universitat de València Press
Creada: 28/10/2008 Última Actualización:
28/10/2008
mitir@alumni.uv.es