Looking forward to the end

Published on Friday 29 February 2008 18:50

Julian Barnes muses on mortality with a wit that is as delightful as the subject is melancholy, writes Stuart Kelly

Nothing to be frightened of

Julian Barnes

Jonathan Cape, 17.99

ALTHOUGH this book opens with novelist Julian Barnes's grandparents, describes the deaths of both of his parents and details his relationship with his philosopher brother Jonathan, he is adamant that "this is not, by the way, 'my autobiography'." I would contend that this is exactly the kind of autobiography you would expect the author of Flaubert's Parrot, A History Of The World In 101/2 Chapters and Arthur & George to produce. It is witty, poignant and allusive, deals with the problems of memory and bristles with asides on poetry, penguins and religion. Most of all, it is about that unnameable "of" of the title: death.

Early on, Barnes quotes a lovely French phrase, le rveil mortel, meaning the sudden realisation of your mortality. Or, as he more eloquently parses it, a moment when the alarm clock goes off in an unfamiliar hotel room by which you are "suddenly pitched from sleep into darkness, panic, and a vicious awareness that this is a rented world". Into his sixties, he starts to think seriously about the imminence of extinction.

This preoccupation with death takes Barnes on a journey that meanders as delightfully as the topic is melancholy. He imagines his own death and contrasts his parents' deaths – decrepitude versus dementia; he analyses various religious, ethical and even political approaches to death (via a bizarre case of amateur French cryonics and some faulty wiring). What would a "good death" be? Is there any feasible afterlife: harps and wings, the DNA of your children, your immortal literary works?

As you might expect, there is a great deal of bookish Gallic material – elegant disquisitions on Montaigne, Daudet, Renard and Flaubert – but these are integrated unpretentiously and, as always with Barnes, salient as well as unexpected. This is a volume of final words and graveyard musings.

But what surprises most about Nothing To Be Frightened Of is how funny it actually is. At times this is an outraged bemusement, as when he writes about a driven CEO who, on receiving a terminal diagnosis, went about "unwinding" his life: the most mortifying "to do" list. The sign in an American graveyard, Lots Available, becomes a hysterical pun. He speculates about his last reader, with elegiac and forgiving tones, until he realises that this ultimate reader, by definition, is the person who does not pass on your book to another. At which point, he writes: "I was about to mourn your passing, but I'm getting over it fast." He manages to find space to take well-aimed potshots at misery memoir and Christian resurrection.

A lot of the dark humour in the book comes from Barnes's interchanges with his brother. Jonathan is the ber-rationalist, who on the first page denounces his brother's statement "I don't believe in God, but I miss him" with the single word "soppy". He then takes exception at the logical inconsistency of the phrase "what she would have wanted" at their mother's funeral on the grounds that it is (a) hypothetical and that (b) only the living have wants anyway.

As a foil, the elder Barnes is wonderful; and his novelist sibling makes the most of their differing memories and attitudes. He's the dose of cold water whenever Julian gets maudlin. Their differences are ascribed, by Julian, to one being breast-fed and the other bottle-fed; a diagnosis that leads to a wonderful comic reversal towards the closing pages. It's an over-simplification to see Julian as fiction and Jonathan as truth, and it's an over-simplification that is addressed with panache and subtlety.

For all the wit, a vein of irony runs throughout the book. Death may not be an artist, as Renard said, but he has certain ironies. Barnes wryly finds exceptions to the grand pronouncements on death and dying, and provides wonderful anecdotes on particularly iconic deaths. There is nothing glib or facetious about this book, despite its overwhelming sense of the massive absurdity at the heart of being alive. On the last page, Barnes experiments with "The End" in different fonts and sizes, words he has never written in a book before. His final choice, modest and elegant, seems wholly appropriate.v