Monday, January 29, 2018

Julian Barnes / ‘Flaubert could have written a great novel about contemporary America’




Julian Barnes: ‘Flaubert could have written a great novel about contemporary America’

The writer discusses his latest novel, the demands of modern readers and his fondness for unusual books

Interview by Rachel Cooke
Monday 29 January 2018
Julian Barnes is the author of 13 novels, including The Sense of an Ending, which won the Booker prize, and The Noise of Time. He has also written three books of short stories, four collections of essays and two books of nonfiction, Nothing to Be Frightened of and the bestselling Levels of Life. In 2017, he was appointed an officer of the Légion d’honneur. His new novel, which opens in suburban Surrey in the early 1960s, is The Only Story (Jonathan Cape, £16.99).


Your new novel is about an affair between a young man, Paul, and an older woman, Susan. Which came to you first: the characters, their situation or the book’s themes of innocence and experience?
The situation, as it always does. I never start by making up a bunch of characters and then wonder what might happen to them. I think of a situation, an impossible dilemma, a moral or emotional quandary, and then wonder to whom it might happen and when and where. In part, this novel came out of The Sense of an Ending, in which there is a central relationship between a young man and a middle-aged woman, about which we are told nothing. We just have to intuit what it must have been like from the scantiest of evidence. Here, we are told all, though this couple is different from that couple.

Is first love uniquely painful, all-enveloping, potentially dangerous? The reader may come to feel that it is.
Then the reader would be correct. Any love is enveloping and potentially dangerous; after all, you are putting your heart into someone else’s hands and with that an incredible power to cause pain of various kinds (and vice versa). That’s a given. But there is an additional absolutism about first love, when you have nothing to compare it with. You don’t know anything, yet you feel you know everything – this can be calamitous. Remember Turgenev – one of the greatest novelists on the subject of love. His novella First Love is based on an incident from his early life. At the age of 13, he became violently infatuated with a young woman of about 20 – only to make the crushing discovery that the woman in question was already his father’s mistress. And as Paul says in the novel: first love fixes a life forever, either as template or as counter-example. Turgenev fell in love on many subsequent occasions, but the settling-down he eventually opted for was a companionable ménage à trois with the great singer Pauline Viardot and her husband. It’s hard not to connect that “safe” solution to the cauterising effect of his first love.

Paul isn’t an unreliable narrator, exactly. But he makes a point of reminding the reader that memory is unreliable, that the events he describes are not, in fact, the only story. Why?
No, I don’t think of Paul as an unreliable narrator, rather as a partial narrator. He’s trying to tell us the truth, but it can, as with any of us, only be the truth as he sees it. And he’s trying to be honourable – to honour the truth and to honour Susan. But he feels he has to warn the reader as he submits to the vagaries of memory. Memory isn’t linear, after all. It sorts and sifts more by priority than chronology, I think. And becomes increasingly unreliable. But, excluding diaries and documents, it’s our only guide to the emotional past.


What about Susan? We only see her through his eyes; she’s both a presence and an absence.
She is a woman of her time and class: naturally intelligent, funny and optimistic, yet deprived of education and trying to make her way in a world in which men have made the only rules that seem to be around. Yet one unwilling to accept all of those restrictions. Which makes her vulnerable when incompatible pressures are put on her. Paul describes her as well as he is able, but he sees her with a lover’s eyes, and despite – or because of – that, what he sees is partial; perhaps this gives her an air of absence. But I think it’s more that she is subsumed into the world she finds herself in, as many women were – and still are.

Julian Barnes by Pablo García


Twenty-first century readers often demand likability in fictional characters. What do you feel about this? Paul’s behaviour isn’t necessarily always likable.
I was reading a New Yorker online piece the other week by Roxanna Robinson, who always gives her first-year writing students at Hunter College Madame Bovary. And each year their reactions are predictably depressing. It’s a “cold” book, Flaubert doesn’t “like” his characters enough, Emma Bovary is “selfish”, she’s a “materialist” and, best of all, she’s a “bad mother”. One boy thinks that Rodolphe’s cowardly letter dismissing Emma is really cool (ie, applicable to his own life) until he is beaten up by the female students and backs down. In other words, these characters and their creator aren’t nice enough, they wouldn’t be my friends, they’re not enough like me and mine… It’s a world in which reading has been corrupted by the cliches of film and television – cliches of character as well as plot.

It’s also a world in which students demand to be protected by “trigger warnings”. Fine, I think. Let’s put on the front of every great, classic novel the words: TRIGGER WARNING – CONTAINS TRUTH. Oh, Flaubert could have written a great novel about contemporary America. So, to answer your question, it never crosses my mind whether certain readers will like or dislike certain characters. They are who they are and they do what the story demands. That’s all I care about.
What books are on your bedside table?
Keith Vaughan’s Journals, James Fenton’s Selected Poems, Posy Simmonds’s Literary Life, Adam Begley’s biography of John Updike. But on top of them are my more usual bedtime reading: copies of Private Eye and The Art Newspaper.

What’s the last really great book that you read?
Can I change that to “the last book by a great writer”? Ismael Kadare’s The General of the Dead Army. I’m amazed he hasn’t won the Nobel.


Which classic novel did you read recently for the first time?
Northanger Abbey. I’d always avoided it as I assumed it was a bit substandard – for her. Then I saw a couple of fellow novelists proposing it as her best book. I imagine they enjoyed its self-referentiality. But it falls away badly after the midpoint. So I still think Persuasion is her greatest novel.

What kind of reader were you as a child?
Diligent rather than obsessive, I’d say. Television didn’t arrive in our household until I was about 10, so my imagination would have been first stirred by the printed word. Comics and the public library. Enid Blyton, Biggles, William and so on. Imperial nostalgia and war glory were much in evidence. My favourite story in a comic was about a group of footballers who joined up, in a “pals’ brigade”, presumably, in the first world war. They take a football with them and as they go over the top and run through no man’s land towards the Hun trenches they dribble and pass the ball from one to another. A machine-gun nest opens up, but the centre-forward, with a glorious strike of the ball from 30 yards or so, takes the gunner out, smack in the face, and the pals are safe and victorious. Glorious hokum for a 10-year-old.

What book might people be surprised to see on your shelves?
Pig-Sticking or Hog-Hunting by Sir Robert Baden-Powell; Rope Spinning by DW Pinkney; Why Not Grow Young? by Robert W Service, “who in his 55th year is still growing young”; My System for Children by JP Muller; Tap Dancing Made Easy by “Isolde”; and many more of this kind.

What’s the best book you have ever received as a present?
Best in the sense of most consulted: The Times Atlas of the World, which a friend gave me for my 50th birthday. Vital for crosswords, excellent for dream journeys.

• The Only Story by Julian Barnes is published by Jonathan Cape (£16.99). 



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Julian Barnes / My life as bibliophile

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