Before her death in 2016, Anita Brookner would go for lunch with Julian Barnes nearly every year. The novelists had much in common. Both were outsiders: she the daughter of Polish Jews, he raised in London’s unfashionable Metroland; both were Francophiles who wrote acutely about art; and both had a certain chilly reserve in their writing. When they were both nominated for the Booker in 1984, Brookner thought Barnes should have won for Flaubert’s Parrot; she won for Hotel du Lac.
Barnes namechecks Brookner in his story “Knowing French”, in which an elderly ex-teacher finds their books in the library. (“Having done Barnes, I move on to Brookner, Anita”). He has admitted that the pessimistic divorcée Mme Wyatt in 1991’s Talking it Over was partly inspired by her. But the title character in Barnes’s new novel bears an even closer resemblance.
Elizabeth Finch (EF) is described by our narrator Neil, her former student, as “high-minded, self-sufficient, European.” Like Brookner, her “voice is enriched by decades of smoking”, and she also has a mysterious private life. At their lunches, EF asks Neil eagerly about his veal, “How is that? […] Disappointing?” and stays for exactly 75 minutes – practically the same anecdote Barnes relays in his lovely tribute to Brookner published after her death.
Of course this is fiction and so the source material is carefully elaborated on. EF teaches a course on Culture and Civilisation, rather than art history, and she is planning a book on Julian the Apostate. After her death, Neil is left to decipher her cryptic notes about the Roman emperor who tried to turn back the tide of Christianity. The novel’s middle section breaks off from the slow-burning character study and gives us – in typical Barnes fashion – an essay written by Neil on Julian.
The final third wraps up the themes of the unknowability of the past – whether it’s a historical figure or someone we actually knew – and the passions people hide or misconstrue. Readers of Barnes’s Booker-winning The Sense of an Ending will find the tone familiar.
Part of the challenge of rendering a brilliantly inspirational teacher is making them sufficiently brilliant and inspirational. EF is, we are told, “one of the most original people I’d met in my entire life” and a master of the “epigrammatic generalisation”. But what she actually says tends to fall flat: “She told me that love is all there is. It’s the only thing that matters,” a classmate of Neil reports to him. Perhaps this platitude is Barnes signalling that we should question EF more than Neil does; but the same sentimental paean to love appears in his own A History of the World in 10½ Chapters.
