Through the Window: Seventeen Essays (and one short story)
by Julian Barnes
(Vintage, £10.99)
Martin Amis once introduced a collection of his journalism by saying it wasn’t as easy to put together as you might think, struggling with the photocopier flap and all. Julian Barnes is more punctilious. Collecting up here sundry reviews and introductions he has published since 1996 about writers who matter to him, he has unified them not just with a brief introduction asserting the priority of fiction — “fiction, more than any other written form, explains and expands life” — but with an index so full and expressive it’s a funny composition in its own right.
Being hoiked out of context makes passing observations seem comically definite facts: “Hurd, Douglas: pitiful idea of fiction”, for example, or “Rushdie, Salman: fails to impress”. Then again, the longest thematic entries almost tell a story about what really matters: wildlife, money, sport, food, drink… and sex — which gets the most protracted indexing, with entries on both “boringness of marriage” and “boringness of promiscuity”, “post-coital harness-mending” and “post-coital melon-eating”.
France, however, does not get a general entry, the whole book being full of it. Barnes’s special subject is actually not so much France itself as the Anglo-French crossover, in “Kipling’s France” and “France’s Kipling”, for example, or the admirable essay here, which only Barnes could have written so lucidly, on Translating Madame Bovary.
Three essays on Ford Madox Ford confirm his importance to Barnes, his novella The Sense of an Ending being partly a homage to The Good Soldier and what he calls here “its immaculate use of a ditheringly unreliable narrator, its sophisticated disguise of true narrative behind a false façade of apparent narrative”.
Equally revealing for his own procedures is the essay on the obliquity and ellipticality of Félix Fénéon, whose Novels in Three Lines Barnes admires: “Just fitting in the requisite facts is a professional skill; giving the whole item form, elegance, wit and surprise is an art.”
The one story, Homage to Hemingway, is an over-tidy, over-determined tale from the New Yorker, about a failing author teaching creative writing with diminishing success, trying to persuade resistant students of Hemingway’s merits.
The most eloquent piece is the last, Regulating Sorrow, originally published as a review of the bereavement memoirs of Joyce Carol Oates and Joan Didion but turning on Dr Johnson’s great Rambler essay of 1750, The Proper Means of Regulating Sorrow, which states that there is no remedy for grief provided by nature: “It requires what it cannot hope, that the laws of the universe should be repealed, that the dead should return …”
Barnes does not make direct mention of his own loss but the reader feels it all the more strongly for that tact and the adoption of Johnsonian abstraction. The dedication of this collection is again “For Pat” — not, as he used to be able to put it, “To Pat”.
