November 22, 1992

Chameleon Novelist

By MIRA STOUT

ate one afternoon, the novelist Julian Barnes and I meet at the busy Baker Street tube station in London to catch the 4:14 to Northwood. Buying his ticket, Barnes has the air of an undercover agent; anonymous and detached from the swarm. We are taking a trip to his childhood home, via the Metropolitan Line, which runs through a string of bland rural suburbs. Dating from the early part of the century, the region was known as Metroland -- also the name of Barnes's first novel.

Once settled in the silver train compartment, Barnes hands me a postcard he has bought at the newsstand. It shows an antiquated brown locomotive with the legend "Metro-land" printed across it. "That's what they looked like then," he says helpfully. We sit side by side on the banquette, I next to the window, he looking coolly over my shoulder at the same view, presiding over it like a benign ghost.

The grim tower blocks of Kilburn roll by, giving way to the anodyne playing fields of Harrow-on-the-Hill and tracts of irrepressible weeds, wildflowers and stinging nettles. Slate-gray clouds billow malignantly on the horizon. Barnes took this 45-minute journey to school in the city every day for seven years and did his homework on the train, counting off the stations "like rosary beads." He points out Neasden: "Voted the most uncharismatic place in England!" And Pinner: "John Betjeman country." Betjeman's poems personify this ordinary England of pealing church bells and buttered toast, gas fires and uneventful train journeys like this one.

At this hour the carriage is nearly empty; a milk-faced youth in a Union Jack golf cap mopes at the back, a turbaned Sikh reads a virulent tabloid and nearest us a pair of elderly ladies discuss "a lovely cardigan pattern." Barnes lets the scenery speak for itself. " J'habite Metroland, " says the adolescent protagonist of "Metroland." "It sounded better than Eastwick, stranger than Middlesex; more like a concept in the mind than a place where you shopped. And so, of course, it was. As the Metropolitan Railway had pushed westward in the 1880's, a thin corridor of land was opened up with no geographical or ideological unity: you lived there because it was an area easy to get out of."

We alight at Northwood station and cross the railway bridge into High Street -- an unbridled celebration of genteel mock-Tudor shops, plastic signs and tense traffic junctions. It is more desolate than expected.

To Barnes's dismay there is now a massive Waitrose supermarket smack in the town center; "the new cathedral of Northwood, apparently!" Next, the mock-Tudor police station with its surrealistically matching mock-Tudor bird feeder. "It probably wins the Best-Kept Police Station Award annually," says Barnes, noting its precision-clipped lawn. Pub, car dealership, butcher, war memorial, golf shop, chemist and bank -- there's not much else. The barbershop has been reincarnated as "Philipsharon Unisex Hair Design."

When we turn into his old street, Murray Road, Barnes plays his trump card. "The house isn't here anymore," he drops airily. "They pulled it down to make a block of flats. This might have been No. 65, around here," and we stop to inspect a parking lot that may or may not have been his home. "I think I remember this tree," he says unconvincingly. It is like being guided by an amnesiac.

There's an eerie deserted atmosphere. When we stroll past the burglar-alarmed bungalows called "Glenshee," "Beechwood Court" and "Dinkie," a man charges out and asks us nosily, "Can I help you?" Declining his offer, Barnes moves on, indicating the prominent Reindeer Pub, which I'm surprised to learn he has never been inside; in response he quotes his own rendition of the Philip Larkin poem "I Remember, I Remember": "Here's the pub I never went into/Here's the childhood I never had." Then, a resigned silence.

We search in vain for a tea shop, but have to settle for Kim's Thai Wine Bar, a Frankenstein of a cafe where the British national beverage is dispensed from an automated cappuccino machine. "I always had my tea at home," Barnes says apologetically. After a perfunctory cup we catch the next train back.

It's not until the following week on the phone that Barnes lets slip a confidence about his hometown: "Well, I quite liked it at the time. I mean, I didn't hate it I don't think," he says cautiously. "Yeah, maybe I did. . . . Yeah, I did in fact. Yeah, I did actually. I did hate it. That's true; I loathed it."

As an imaginative teen-ager growing up in a provincial commuter village, Barnes seems to have been suspiciously well behaved. Had he never wanted to rebel, I ask as we near London. Barnes looks surprised, and says: "It didn't seem plausible to go to Abyssinia, like Rimbaud; the farthest I got was hitchhiking to Coventry Cathedral. Perhaps I wasn't rebellious enough. Or maybe I was saving it all for the novel."

A telling remark, for if Barnes's childhood and present circumstances exude a sense of snug comfort, his work excavates the paved surface of middle-class life and leaves behind unsettling craters. It's there that he takes risks.

Julian Barnes is the chameleon of British letters. He's probably best-known for his prize-winning literary novel "Flaubert's Parrot," but has written 11 books altogether, including four thrillers under a pseudonym. He enjoys a gilded reputation. He is fashionable and cultivated, and when you try to define him, he changes color again. Barnes's novels range from the epic to the miniature, and continually experiment with novelistic form. His prose style adapts moodily to the character of his subjects so that no two novels are alike. His subjects? Better yet, what's not a subject? Obsessional love, dislocation, death, voyage, endurance, art, religion, Eastern Europe, the manifold nature of reality -- and sandwiches.

Is Julian Barnes a potentially great novelist with a restless streak, or is he a middling talent masking his shortcomings with formal trickery? It's probably too soon to tell, but meanwhile the suspense creates unforced excitement in literary circles.

Barnes can be (Continued on page 68) as hard to quantify as his fiction. Even his writer-friends resort to cliches like "the strong, silent type" and "intensely private" to describe him. Complex, educated, ironic, he is a reconstructed suburbanite discreet to the point of caginess.

When I visit Barnes's present home, a stout Edwardian brick house in North London, he greets me with a cordially raised eyebrow. It has been three years since we last met. During this short time the ambitiousness of his last two novels, "A History of the World in 10 1/2 Chapters" and "Talking it Over," has brought him international fame. He appears much as before, steady, careful, but more guarded. He seems to regard press attention as unreal and faintly grubby, but maintains the suave, circumlocutory politesse of a consular official.

Barnes, 46, is at the center of a close-knit circle of unusually gifted British writers that includes Martin Amis, Ian McEwan, Kazuo Ishiguro and Salman Rushdie. (Barnes, Amis and McEwan wine, dine, holiday and play sports together.) The fact that Barnes's wife, the influential literary agent Patricia Kavanagh, represents him and some of their friends undeniably adds to a sense of cliquishness. And Jay McInerney is one of his closest friends.

Barnes lives in Dartmouth Park, a leafy no man's land between the raffish Tufnell Park underground station and haut-bourgeois Highgate. High on a hill, Dartmouth Park commands a distant view of the dome of St. Paul's Cathedral, but it feels remote from the metropolis. Traditional British conveniences abound: dingy fish-and-chip shop, Indian takeout, even a sluggish-looking pub called the Tally-Ho. Barnes's tree-lined crescent of detached villas seems ordinary soil for fertilizing his orchidlike novels.

Beyond the front door his urbanity is better reflected. Though Barnes would wince at the description, the house has glossy-magazine chic; huge light-flooded rooms and understated antiques, including a much-used billiard table. Barnes's study reveals him as a finicky, almost fetishistic collector: wooden soldiers, insects, literary caricatures, memorabilia of his idol, Flaubert, mementos of his own novels, wine corks saved from special dinners and a poignant pack of his friend Arthur Koestler's cigarettes, rescued from his armchair after his suicide.

Barnes's public obscurity is partly a result of his constitutional desire for privacy -- he expertly snows the press with unprintably long-winded, oblique outpourings -- and partly because he fails the tough British glamour test, which usually demands you be firmly related to someone titled or famous. This, though Barnes has won numerous prizes (including the Somerset Maugham Award, for "Metroland," published in 1980) and is the first Englishman to win the French Prix Medicis, for his inventive 1984 best seller, "Flaubert's Parrot." But modesty is not the issue: Barnes's ambition is positively monumental. Quite un-British is his claim: "In order to write, you have to convince yourself that it's a new departure not only for you but for the entire history of the novel."

Moving about his airy terra-cotta-tiled kitchen, Barnes makes a pot of tea and talks about his new novel, "The Porcupine" (box, page 72). He has a curious presence. His face has been described as that of a Plantagenet cardinal; you can imagine him refusing to grant indulgences as his Wedgwood-blue eyes regard you archly down a long, bony nose. Yet he also exudes a faintly East Coast-American enterprise and self-awareness that contradicts his whalebone-reinforced English reserve. Despite his mild, smiling cooperation, Barnes remains firmly masked. Hearing his soft-spoken, precise speech, you expect a wispy individual, but Barnes is physically meaty and substantial, his movements feline; voice and body do not gel. Imagine a rugby-playing art historian, and that is nearly the effect. He admits to "a vulgar curiosity" about fellow authors' interviews, but looks slightly ill at the prospect of providing a similar entertainment for others. He averts his head when speaking, as one does when giving a blood sample.

"The Porcupine" is set in Eastern Europe -- virgin territory for the writer. It depicts the trial of a fictional ex-Communist leader, Petkanov (the eponymous "Porcupine"), and the rise of his nemesis, Solinsky, an opportunistic young prosecutor. Suppressing his usual tendency toward digressive narrative, Barnes advances a short, sharp, sweeping tale of a nation's upheaval, loosely based on Bulgaria. Barnes became fascinated with the plight of the upended people he met there on a book tour, and wrote "The Porcupine" with their help.

Being something of a challenge addict, Barnes was not fazed by writing about Eastern Europe as a Westerner: "My hesitancies were nothing to do with, 'Oh, I should leave this to the boys on the ground.' That way you only end up writing about your own country or experience. . . . That's what fiction is: use of the imagination."

Perhaps more than any of his peers, Barnes has colonized the territory of the imagination as his own. Rootless and stateless, freewheeling through time, his is the slightly lonely world of the oddball dreamer with feet of clay and a head like an unindexed encyclopedia. Others, like Martin Amis, may be better at evoking the sweaty immediacies of modern life, or, like Milan Kundera, more felicitous at blending the philosophical with the carnal (which Barnes also attempts). But if Barnes's writing is more disengaged, it rewards with a capacity to soar. His inventiveness is subtler than the magical realism of Rushdie. He bathes mundane realities in a transfiguring light, recognizing the extraordinary in the ordinary. He observes a boring landscape and endows it with fanciful, wishful patterns and symbols -- to pedantic and poignant effect.

Barnes's polished language proves Flaubert's opinion that "prose is like hair; it shines with combing." While his touch is mousse-light, it often disguises the depth of his themes. In the case of "Flaubert's Parrot," a man's grief for his dead wife is masked by a potty obsession with Flaubertian trivia. While reminiscent of the post-modernism of Calvino and Nabokov, "Parrot" is a fresh and accessible reworking of the collage-style of writing -- fiction, literary criticism, footnote and satire -- that has become Barnes's benchmark. "Staring at the Sun," published two years later, also balances grand themes with gemlike wit. Arguably Barnes's strongest novel, the book takes its protagonist, Jean Sergeant, a pliant, uneducated woman, from childhood to death with compassionate insight into her longings and disappointments, and celebrates the small miracles that sustain her. The title refers to the epiphany of a World War II fighter pilot who tells the young Jean of the morning he saw the sun rising twice, an image that haunts Jean all her life. Barnes's specialty of making whimsical details as compelling as more freighted events is strong here, as in Jean's recurring curiosity about the fate of the sandwiches Lindbergh never ate on his trans-Atlantic flight.

Barnes's flashier best seller, "A History of the World in 10 1/2 Chapters" (1989), reveals weaknesses as well as inspired enterprise. Promising much, his chapters begin with Noah's ark and end in heaven, and are knitted loosely together by the theme of voyage and salvation. Barnes indulges his jokey, mocking tendencies to paint a black view of human experience -- godless, blundering, cruel, arbitrary, silly -- that is daring and rich in places, but uneven. Earnest and striving, he seems to be racing to build an intellectual ark from scraps, with leaky results.

In "Talking It Over," published in 1991, the ventriloquial Barnes adopts a smaller-scale voice, reminiscent of early Kingsley Amis and Philip Larkin -- and of his own second novel, "Before She Met Me." "What he's really good at is creating a suspense through themes and ideas, which is very rare," says Martin Amis. "It's life at an angle. When he goes straight at life" -- as he does in "Talking It Over" -- "he's not playing to his strengths. It's like that bit in 'Flaubert's Parrot,' looking through pieces of stained glass and seeing things reflected and refracted; that's the way he catches fire as a writer." Amis views his peer's experiments as the province of the truly gifted. "His work is at a sophisticated remove from what everyone else is doing," Amis says matter-of-factly.

Jay McInerney agrees. "A lot of novelists set up a kind of franchise, and turn out a familiar product. I mean, one can speak of a Jean Rhys novel, or an Evelyn Waugh, but what I like about Jules's work is that he's like an entrepreneur who starts up a new company every time out. He doesn't cultivate a recognizable voice whose sentences are instantly a signature; Julian submerges his personality in the work. But he's always kind of hidden there in the underbrush. He reinvents the wheel; I'm always fascinated to see what shape it's going to be next."

The Barnes-McInerney friendship puzzles many -- Barnes, cool and balanced; ex-brat McInerney, flamboyant and volatile. They met in London in 1985, at a publication party for McInerney's "Bright Lights, Big City." Barnes invited him to supper, and they've been cronies ever since. They send each other frequent faxes, "mostly jokes about inflated sales figures, and bragging about cases of wine we've picked up," explains McInerney, although Barnes faxed him a long treatise about marriage when McInerney announced his third engagement last year.

When I remark on Barnes's reticence at self-disclosure, McInerney says: "In England it's harder to get away from your childhood, but in America the idea that you reinvent yourself and bury your tracks is almost a given. Any sense that Julian has traveled a long way from the suburbs seems natural to me." Barnes admires Cheever and Updike, fellow chroniclers of suburban angst. His fiction, however varied in form, essentially addresses the spiritual void of the middle-class man.

"This is increasingly a condition of modern life," says Barnes. "I grew up in a place that looks like a settled community but is in fact full of rootless people. You have this psychic rootlessness, which is characteristic of how we are."

Julian Barnes was born in 1946 in Leicester in the Midlands -- the heart of middle England. His parents, both French teachers, moved to Acton when Julian was 6 weeks old and moved again to Northwood, a wealthier, greener London suburb when he was 10. Shortly after, he won a scholarship to a private boys' school in the City of London and became a prepubescent commuter.

Julian's laconic father, Albert Leonard Barnes, and his talkative mother, Kaye, both came from flinty north Midlands families and raised their two sons in a typically English spirit of sound middle-class caution, stability and routine (achingly well evoked in "Metroland"). Times-reading agnostics, they were moderate in their politics but fanatical about gardening. Family vacations were usually spent at coastal resorts and the Channel Islands. Julian and his elder brother, Jonathan, (now a philosophy don), were the first of their family to attend Oxbridge.

Financially squeezed, they occupied the ground floor of a spacious house on tree-lined Murray Road in Northwood, complete with squirrels and acorns, and rented out the upper floors, mostly to air force personnel (his father had been an adjutant in the air force in India), whom Barnes remembers mainly because "they made the dustbins more interesting."

He closes down noticeably when speaking of himself or his family, almost fading at the edges with apprehension, like an animal camouflaging itself to avoid detection. His diplomat's eloquence fails. It becomes clear that he wishes not to hurt his mother by any offhand remark. (For a time Barnes didn't communicate with his family.) "It was a safe childhood," he begins. "I can't remember a row between my parents -- ever. They were very English, controlled, certainly not given to spontaneous or extravagant gestures. I mean, when I got the letter saying I'd got the scholarship to Oxford I remember rushing in and saying, "I got the scholarship to Magdalen!" and my mother saying, "Yes, we thought that's what it was."

Highlights of his youth included stamp collecting. He admits to being slightly overshadowed both in general and philatelic terms by his exceptionally clever brother, who was made a school prefect; Julian compensated by becoming a "back-row cynic" and sportsman, playing cricket and rugby for his school.

Amid this robust normality, he tried in vain to electrify his parents by playing them loud recordings of Bartok string quartets. He later took to writing resentful diaries and reading precociously: "Rimbaud, Baudelaire, Verlaine, Voltaire and Tolstoy to begin with," he recalls. "But I had no ambition to be a writer then, I hadn't the confidence."

Oxford, he says, "wasn't a recipe for either happiness or achievement." He was bored and self-conscious. "I suppose I was disappointed that I didn't fall in with a glittering circle of friends," he says bemusedly. "I think I was probably oppressed by the myth of Oxford -- climbing over the college walls late at night, getting drunk -- but there seemed something rather inauthentic about it." He was shy, an inept drinker, and had never been to a party before attending Oxford.

After graduation he was offered a job ("for competent failures") as a tax inspector, but went to work instead as a lexicographer on the Oxford English Dictionary for three years. He wrote a book on Oxford that was never published, and moved to London to study for the bar. Instead, he ended up as deputy literary editor to Martin Amis on the leftish magazine The New Statesman, along with the journalist Christopher Hitchens and the poet James Fenton.

"I loved all the different aspects of journalism," says Barnes. "It was wonderful there, fun, fizzing, and everyone liked one another. Things came into focus, and the pleasure factor has increased annually from my late 20's onward." Although his slender first novel, "Metroland," took about eight years to write ("I was my own best discourager"), he has since shown excess zeal, publishing seven mostly best-selling novels and four thrillers in 12 years. He is also The New Yorker's London correspondent.

Though Barnes has given me a solid resume of his life, there is a sense of feelings and impressions being withheld like a poker player's cards. "There has always been an inscrutability about him, even to his best friends," Martin Amis comments. "The rest of us are a bunch of cheerful blabbermouths compared to him. He was always more discreet, more grown up. He collects things, he's systematic. Did he tell you he smokes one cigarette a day? He takes longer to get to know than most people, but he sort of looms up on you as a friend."

Barnes is more of a sports-bonder, according to Amis. "We watch the World Cup together. He's nuts about sports. Julian screams and leaps about. Yeah. You really see him unbuttoned there."

Barnes and Pat Kavanagh were introduced by Mark Boxer, the cartoonist, at an office party over a decade ago. Kavanagh wasn't his agent then, but is now. "Pat is formidably successful as an agent, and Julian is formidably successful as a novelist; there's a good balance," says Liz Calder, head of Bloomsbury Publishing, and Barnes's friend and former editor.

Their marriage suffered a fracture three years ago when Kavanagh had a widely known affair with a young female novelist. A friend said Barnes was "gutted" at the time. They have both worked at repairing their marriage. Love and jealousy are central subjects of Barnes's fiction. "And I'm not saying love will make you happy -- above all, I'm not saying that," he writes in "A History of the World." "If anything I tend to believe that it will make you unhappy; either immediately unhappy, as you are impaled by incompatibility; or unhappy later, when the woodworm has quietly been gnawing away for years and the bishop's throne collapses. But you can believe this and still insist that love is our only hope."

Barnes and Kavanagh are admired hosts, with Barnes renowned for his smoked-salmon souffles. "Julian has almost a salon running there," says Jay McInerney, a frequent house guest. "The question is, Who wouldn't you find there from the cultural world?"

Although they are not, as a McInerney puts it, "kid-o-phobic," Barnes and Kavanagh decided against children. ("I think you should only if you both absolutely have to," Barnes clarifies.)

Consequentially perhaps, their London garden gets much attention. "It's like something you'd find in a country rectory," says Liz Calder. Kavanagh and a gardener tend the flowers, and Barnes farms a vegetable patch where even his potatoes are exotic strains. Says McInerney: "They've created a little kingdom . . . the garden, the wine cellar, the kitchen, and the guest book where visitors draw self-caricatures. It's almost too good to be true. I don't know -- they make a great case for childlessness!"

I DID WANT MY Father to like 'Flaubert's Parrot,' " Barnes told me as we returned on the Metropolitan Line from our trip to Northwood. "He came to the phone after he'd read it, and said, 'Concur generally, as the wing commander would say!' " he said, imitating his father's clipped military voice. "That was all he could say about it. I found that sad, both as a writer and a son." Barnes's father was very ill for several years before dying, and there was no particular "coming to terms" between them. "He didn't want to let on that he was dying. He knew I was fond of him, and I knew he was fond of me, but we never made those statements."

Stale suburban scenery flowed past the window, an air of lives half-lived, a pious, melancholy conservatism. The fanciful imagination of Barnes's work looked logical from here. You might well take flight, invent other worlds to survive it. Where the monolithic poetry of his spiritual uncle, Philip Larkin, is sunk like a headstone into these green commons, Barnes's fiction skims above it, refusing to land.

Suddenly the train picked up alarming speed, rattling crazily through one or two stations. We exchanged fearful glances, and I considered running to the conductor's cab to see if he was slumped over the controls. For the first time of our acquaintance, Barnes became truly animated. "I refuse to die on the Metropolitan Line!" he shouted above the din.

These seem apt last words. Just as abruptly, the train slowed to normal speed again and Barnes regained his composure, preparing to disembark at Finchley Road station as if nothing had happened. A smile, a quick handshake, and he stepped off onto the platform. Striding away, he blended in with the crowd and was gone.

Mira Stout lives in London and contributes to this magazine on cultural subjects.

FROM 'PARROT' TO 'PORCUPINE'

"THEY LOVED ME," HE SAID unexpectedly. "My people loved me."

Solinsky wondered whether to let that go. But why should he? Just because a tyrant had messed his trousers. He was the Prosecutor General at all times, he should remember that. So he answered, slowly and emphatically, "They loathed you. They feared you and they loathed you."

"That would be too easy," Petkanov countered. "That would be too convenient for you. That is your lie."

"They loathed you."

"They told me they loved me. Many times."

"If you beat someone with a stick and order them to say they love you, and keep on beating them and beating them, sooner or later they will tell you what you want to hear."

"It was not like that. They loved me." Petkanov repeated. "They called me Father of the People. I dedicated my life to them and they recognized it."

"You called yourself Father of the People. The security police held up banners, that was all. Everyone hated you."

Ignoring Solinsky, the former President stood up, walked to his bed and lay down. He said to himself, to the ceiling, to Solinsky, to the deaf-mute militiaman, "They loved me. That is what you cannot bear. That is what you will never come to terms with. Remember it." Then he shut his eyes.

In repose he seemed to regain his toughness and stubbornness; the flesh relaxed in folds, but the bones got harder, more prominent. As Peter Solinsky was about to look away, he spotted a terra-cotta dish beneath the low bed, with a plant straggling out across the floor. So the rumor was true. Stoyo Petkanov really did sleep with a wild geranium under his bed, superstitiously imagining that it brought good health and a long life. It was just a dictator's silly whim, but at that moment it terrified the prosecutor. Good health and a long life. Petkanov liked to boast that both his father and grandfather had lived to be centenarians. What would they do with him for the next 25 years? Peter had a sudden nauseating vision of the President's future rehabilitation. He saw a television series, "Stoyo Petkanov: My Life and Times," starring a genial nonagenarian. He saw himself cast as a villain.

The former President began to snore. Even in this he was not predictable. His snore had no frailty to it, or even comedy; instead it was dismissive, almost imperious. Obediently, the Prosecutor General left.

URL: http://www.nytimes.com/books/01/02/25/specials/barnes-chameleon.html

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