Book review: Through The Window: Seventeen Essays (Plus One Short Story), by Julian Barnes

SPEAKING to a friend and fellow critic the other week, we fell into a conversation about the odd fact that so many of the most prominent contemporary English novelists actually excel at non-fiction rather than fiction.

Through The Window: Seventeen Essays (Plus One Short Story)

By Julian Barnes

Vintage, 244pp, £10.99

The most obvious example is Martin Amis: his novels may have been in a steady decline since (take your pick) The Information or London Fields or Money, but his memoir, Experience, and his book on the British infatuation with Stalin, Koba The Dread, keep his literary star in the firmament. Similarly, I would rather re-read The Jaguar’s Smile or Imaginary Homelands by Salman Rushdie than The Ground Beneath Her Feet or Fury.

The most wistful and intriguing version of this phenomenon is Julian Barnes. His best-known books – Flaubert’s Parrot and A History of the World in 10½ chapters – are as much non-fiction as fiction; they are books drenched in the puzzling over things given as facts. Although I thought Arthur & George ought to have won prizes and The Sense of an Ending managed to make winning the Man Booker seem like a consolation prize, were I pushed to recommend a favourite work by Barnes, I would most likely say The Pedant in the Kitchen. It’s a very slim book, and a very sly book, where Barnes exasperates, fulminates and becomes increasingly frustrated over the difference between following a recipe and knowing how to cook.

This new collection made me want to spend more time with the non-fictional Julian Barnes. It is engaging, eloquent, entertaining and erudite. It does not read as if it were an expedient gathering-together of fugitive pieces to capitalise on his success with the Man Booker; indeed, if it has a defining characteristic, it is that it is beautifully considered in both manner and judgement.

Given that Barnes is a Commandeur de l’Ordre des Art et des Lettres and has won both the Prix Médicis and the Prix Femina, it is unsurprising that both France and British Francophilia feature heavily. He introduces figures only slightly known in the Anglophone sphere; in particular the maxim writer Nicholas-Sébastien Roch de Chamfort and Félix Féneon, author of the astonishing and inadvertently post-modernist book Novels In Three Lines, a collection of “filler” news stories he wrote for Le Matin (what the French call, Barnes informs us, the “chiens écrasés”, or run-over dogs, column). Féneon, an anarchist, hack and the subject of portraits by Signac and Bonnard, almost aspired to literary invisibility, and the Novels In Three Lines seems like a ghostly precursor of the banally-reported horrors of Bolaño and the surreal concision of Barthelme.

What Barnes most excels at is reading. In one of his three essays on the now-fashionable Ford Madox Ford (a situation rather galling to those of us who loved his work before Benedict Cumberbatch came along) he gives the most beautiful description of what it is like to be a critical reader. He notes that the famous opening sentence of The Good Soldier – “this is the saddest story I have ever heard” – is problematic in that Dowell has not just heard the story, he is utterly implicated in it. Firstly, Barnes notes that it is only a second reading that a reader becomes sensitised to the irony and sheer awkwardness of the sentence. He continues “And if the second verb of the first sentence of the book is unreliable – if it gives a creak under the foot as we put our weight on it – then we must be prepared to treat every line as warily; we must prowl soft-footed through the text, alive for every board’s moan and plaint”.

The short story is the least successful part of the book, but its virtues are non-fiction virtues. In three sections, each about teaching creative writing (with a few smart barbs throughout) the subtext of the story is the difficulty of teaching subtext. Among the other topics Barnes takes up are Updike and a heartfelt appreciation of the work of Penelope Fitzgerald (which yields a few pieces of natty literary gossip), two essays on Kipling, and a wonderful enthusiasm for the underrated Victorian poet Arthur Hugh Clough (although Barnes doesn’t mention that the meaningless Gaelic in the title of Clough’s first long poem, The Bothie of Tober-na-Vuolich, is a variation of toper-na-fuosich, a euphemism perhaps best translated as “the bearded well”. As Robert Crawford has said, it would be as shocking as Tennyson writing a poem called “Vagina”).

Although the book’s subtitle promises 17 essays and a short story, there is a final additional work of creative non-fiction: the index. It may seem peculiar to say so but the Index here is a work of beauty. Beginning “Ackroyd, Peter; fails to impress, 7” – actually Penelope Fitzgerald’s opinion but reframed sneakily here – and going on to “adultery: rarely a good idea, 20; boringness of promiscuity, 68; routine subject for French novels, 96; Nabokov on, 202; loses its thrall, 204-5”, one could almost take the index as a Féneon-style surreptitious story. There is a wonderful wit at work throughout this: take, for example, the entry “Dreyfus case: inspires FM Ford to lie, 52; inspires French soldiers to weep, 92”. It ends with what might even be the elusive Julian Barnes manifesto: “young writers: should be warned by Penelope Fitzgerald’s example, 5-6; should be warned by Clough’s example, 24; should be warned by Ford’s example, 43; should be warned by Chamfort’s example, 104; should follow John Updike’s example, 199”.

There is a capacious generosity throughout this book, and I would defy anyone not to leave without feeling both better informed and better disposed. The quirkiness which has always been Barnes’ most appealing quality is here in a distilled and heady form: if his novels are Beaujolais, his non-fiction is Madeira. It is rare indeed for a collection of occasional pieces such as this is to inspire feelings of profound thankfulness.