Author of thirteen novels, Julian Barnes is one of the most acclaimed English writers of fiction and non-fiction in the world. Born in Leicester in 1946, he won the 2011 Booker Prize for The Sense of an Ending, which was later made into a film. Barnes believes the job of a writer is to describe life as truthfully and accurately as possible, with the fiction writer presenting it in a “beautiful way, which has an emotional impact on the reader,” he says. But truth is subjective and collective truths unreliable, Barnes warns.
In his 1998 novel England, England he explored the creation of national identity through invented traditions and myths, questioning the authenticity of what we understand to be history. It ended with Britain being thrown out of the EU having been so irrational in its negotiations! Twenty-two years on and Britain has made its own “deluded, masochistic departure,” believes Barnes. In a meeting with the international press, he was asked to expand on this:
Julian Barnes (English accent): This isn’t normality. Britain is the country of Shakespeare and Winston Churchill; but Britain is also the country of Monty Python and Alice in Wonderland. And though we are thought to be a rational country, sometimes we stand on our head and we think ‘Oh! This is better!’ But at a certain point the blood rushes into the head and you have to stand on your feet again.
DEFENSIVE POLITICS
British politics has lost sight of its wider moral values, Barnes believes. Policies towards the European project, for example, have always been superficial and introspective in their focus.
Julian Barnes: Since we joined what was then the Common Market in the 1970s, the idea of Europe has never been an idealistic one in Britain. Politicians would talk about the economic advantages; they would never talk about it as a project, which had an idealistic, an emotional and a moral context. No prime minister that I can remember since Edward Heath — and Edward Heath fought in the Second World War — has had the courage to say, ‘the European project is a strange, wonderful and necessary thing.’ When I hear those words, then I will know that normality has returned.
IN RETROSPECT
The past and our relationship to it is a recurrent theme of Barnes’ books. His most recent novel The Only Story is set in the 1960s and focuses on a unique relationship: that of a young man who falls for a woman thirty years older than him. Barnes’ stories are told in an innovative way. The Only Story is divided into three sections, with the experiences of its protagonist related in first, second and then third person form.
Julian Barnes: First love exists in the present tense and in the first person. Towards the end of life you look back on life in a much more objective way, and therefore the third person seemed appropriate for that. And then I was thinking, ‘Is it possible to write the middle section in the second person?’ The effect is to bring the reader right in. You’re not being told about it, the reader is experiencing it and can’t get out of it!
UP TO YOU
Placing the reader in an uncomfortable position does not mean telling them how to feel, says Barnes. That’s why he adopts a neutral tone in his books, he says.
Julian Barnes: One thing I don’t want to do as a writer is to direct the reader as to how to respond. I prefer to create a book, a novel where everything is arranged but you’re not told what to conclude from it. If the drama or the tragedy of a particular situation is to have its fullest force, you don’t have the writer telling you what to think, how to react and how to feel. Feeling is really left to the reader, in my view of how to write a book.
CONSTRUCTING IDENTITY
Barnes’ 2008 family memoir Nothing to be Frightened Of reflects on how we build the sense of identity that defines our lives, a prominent theme in contemporary politics and society.
Julian Barnes: It’s a starting point that memory is identity. It’s difficult to think of someone who completely loses their memory who still has the same identity. On the other hand, this doesn’t mean that memory is a solid, unchanging item, that’s what we tend to think when we’re young. As we get older, we realise that memory is very changeable; it depends on our mood at the time, it depends on how often we’ve told the story.
DON’T TRUST YOURSELF
In fact, says Barnes, our favourite memories, whether they are pleasant or unpleasant, are those least likely to be accurate!
Julian Barnes: Memory clearly degrades over the years and the degradation of memory is strongest in our most favourite memories. Every time we tell a story again, we usually change it very slightly, if we don’t notice, so by the end it’s the parts of our lives which we think are the most important, which we remember the most often, which then become the most unreliable. Memory is much closer to the imagination than it is to an observation.