This is from Primo Levi’s The Periodic Table (1984): “We are here for this — to make mistakes and to correct ourselves, to stand the blows and hand them out. We must never feel disarmed: nature is immense and complex, but it is not impermeable to the intelligence; we must circle around it, pierce and probe it, look for the opening or make it.”
Levi is hinting at taking control of the narrative, at presenting the complexity of the task at hand without being squeamish about the unpleasantness it may attract. Such is the fate of Julian Barnes’ Departure(s), which is marketed as his last.
The Booker winning novelist was diagnosed with a “rare type of blood cancer”, according to The Guardian, in 2020. Before the release of Departure(s), Barnes said he had “played all my tunes”, and it was time to bid farewell. Perhaps he is worried about leaving behind incomplete works. Perhaps he doesn’t want others to tinker with his words, or misconstrue them afterwards. In doing that, he has done his readers a favour, unlike Joan Didion, whose jottings were posthumously published as Notes to John, much to the chagrin of her devoted readership.
But we must, before anything else, talk about departure, leaving. There are too many greats who don’t know how to read the sign that it’s about time. If and when they do, they are asked to indulge in the “lucrative business of reminiscing”, to quote out of context from Geoff Dyer’s The Last Days of Roger Federer: And Other Endings. Perhaps Barnes isn’t interested in a retelling of his life as fiction has been more lucrative.
Divided into five parts, the novel begins with the narrator — who may well be the author himself — noting how his love for anything “ghoulish and the extreme” had a friend, Dr Jacky, share a clipping on ‘Proust and madeleine: Together in the thalamus’.
If you’re bringing up Proust, things can go anywhere. But Barnes narrates things with the kind of not-so-scientific precision that takes the nowhere-narrative somewhere. He seems to be teasing the readers who, perhaps, expected a memoir in his twilight years: “What if it could lay in front of you all your retellings and demonstrate how gradually yet systematically you had diverged from your original account? Wouldn’t that be weird and disorienting?”
The author is aware that memories can be contested. However, interestingly, he notes what happens when your brain corrects them in due time, alerting you to the fiction that has been passed off as fact. And what if you may have borrowed someone else’s memory and treated it as your own? Would that be called plagiarism? This idea appears at the start but is completed towards the end of the novel. So, Barnes has plagiarised himself, out of his own will, as Ian McEwan noted in a recent interview.
Before the end of the first part, Barnes writes, “But perhaps the Madeleine Incident, however true in life, should be regarded as a fictional device as much as a transcendental key. Perhaps Proust was a novelist in search of a theory to scaffold his work — which would be a very French thing.” If the reader grasps what the author is doing with Departure(s), a “novel without a middle”, the joke seems to be executed perfectly.
In The Beginning of the Story, which is technically not the beginning of the story, you meet Stephen and Jean, whom the narrator had met at college. They were lovers who drifted apart and never admitted their love to each other.
In typical Barnesesque fashion, the author notes: “You may thank me or you may not. But as writers get older, either they grow egotistically expansive or they think: contain yourself and cut to the chase.” In Departure(s), by removing ‘the middle’, the author effectively treads this line between the two. He has restrained himself and also managed not to cut to the chase. The second and fourth parts of the novel are a testament to that.
Of Stephen and Jean he writes, “I knew the two of them for about 18 months at Oxford, and then, weirdly, for about the same amount of time 40 years later. As I said, I kept few notes on my early life, or the lives of others. And on the whole we remember less well those we count on never seeing again.” Hence, the lost middle. The author — or the narrator — meets these two later, though. But how to fill this void, the lost years of information, barring the biographical footnotes: marriages, employment trajectories, number of children, diseases, etc.? Can — or must — life be reduced to just that?
“Life and memory can be so… quixotic, don’t you find?” he writes, before moving to what’s now knowable to the reader, the absent middle, titled Manageable. What does Barnes ‘manage’ to do with that? Pique readers’ curiosity, continue to entertain them, by noting how and when the cancer made itself known, and how one can be a good thief in art if not in life. Barnes does this by modelling the middle on what one of the doctors told him: “[The cancer] isn’t curable, but it is manageable.” Life, in this novel, also gets managed and Stephen and Jean meet again in The End of the Story.
This fourth part subverts deus ex machina by putting Stephen and Jean in a “Reattachment Dilemma? Here-We-Go-Again Syndrome”. Here, readers get an idea of where their story may be heading:
His tragedy is that he can love, but that his love cannot be accepted.
Her tragedy is that she cannot love, but that what she does offer is accepted as love.
There is a betrayal — or maybe two — at the heart of their story. The author (or is it the narrator?) says: “But I had treated Stephen and Jean as if they were characters in one of my novels, believing I could gently direct them towards the end which I desired. I’d been confusing life with fiction.”
This is a marvellous way to toy with readers as they trudge along believing, all this while, that several strands of Departure(s) are fictional and others are real. Really, humans are cursed because of memory. Wouldn’t it have been great had we been dogs, just like Jimmy, in this novel, who “doesn’t know he’s either old or a dog” — something that McEwan had remarked upon and forgotten, and which Barnes roped into his last novel. Tell me now, how do you review this book?
Perhaps I should quote from Levi again: “Perfection belongs to narrated events, not to those we live.” Reading Departure(s) is an unparalleled lived experience, one that can’t be narrated.
Saurabh Sharma is a Delhi-based writer and freelance journalist. They can be found on Instagram/X: @writerly_life.
