Each new section must compensate for the shortcomings of the last. So it’s all the more mystifying and disappointing that, just as the novel Elizabeth Finch could have been moves tantalisingly into view, Barnes self-sabotages, devoting the book’s entire middle section to Neil’s stolid student essay on Julian the Apostate. Barnes is in his element here – investigating with subtlety and gentleness the quiet mysteries that make up a life. Finch’s studiously bien-pensant truisms, coupled with Barnes’s via negativa characterisation, leave the novel in search of a centre. The reader feels distanced from Finch the novel feels distanced from its subject. Hoping to make a virtue of her absence, Barnes lays down a fog of negation.
This is ambiguity not as subtlety, but avoidance: Finch simply isn’t there. Straining to burnish Finch’s aura, he deploys, then redeploys, a reliable novelistic cliche – charisma through immobility. If Finch and her teaching fall short, our faith in the novel will falter. There’s a sense of daring in depicting the impact of an inspirational teacher. This is a work that both uses and abuses ambiguity. This is a novel that rejects the rigid convictions of cultural polemics while constructing a qualified but resolute polemic of its own. A book that is, among its many layered identities, a manifesto. The novel is in part a fierce defence of the intellectual values that have directed the course of Barnes’s writing from the first. Alongside the characteristically self-deprecating tone of Neil’s hesitant ruminations stands something more steely. Yet it would be a mistake to think that Barnes is simply repeating old tricks in Elizabeth Finch. The story turns on a long relationship, which changes through the decades it focuses on moments of evocative return. Several features of this novel are located in recognizably Barnesian territory. His elusive example, intertwined with the lives of Neil and his fellow students, leads the reader from a personal narrative to the broader framework of history.
A third character, embedded in the ambiguities of textual record and legend, becomes prominent in the narrative: Julian the Apostate, the philosophical Roman emperor. It is the story of Elizabeth Finch, the enigmatic woman who delivered the course. But, as Neil often tells us, 'this is not my story'. The story of Neil’s life – his only story – turns on his experience of a year-long course for mature students on 'Culture and Civilization' that he once took, and its enduring legacy through years of reflection. More concerned with the ambiguity of ideas than with clarity of plot or character, it is a heartfelt celebration of the life of the mind – though its defiance is qualified by the wryness we would expect from Julian Barnes. This uncompromising novel denies its readers many of the pleasures of fiction.
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