Departure(s): Julian Barnes' final novel reflects on endings and memory

Departure(s)

By Julian Barnes 

Published by Penguin Random House

158 pages, ₹999 

  At the beginning of “Going Nowhere”, the fifth and last part of Departure(s), Julian Barnes goes back to a poem he had read when he was 18: “It was quite a stretch for an English suburban teenager to access the mind and sensibility of a prematurely middle-aged French Symbolist poet.” For many younger readers, going through Departure(s) would be a similar experience — Barnes, 80, has declared it to be the last novel he will ever write, thus “denying agency to death. Though in a minor way”. 

The book combines elements of fiction and autobiography. The narrator is a writer named Julian who has recently been diagnosed with blood cancer and talks often about his wife who died from a brain tumour, and if this wasn’t enough, he also sneakily asks the reader to Google any biographical detail that he mentions. The book also invites the reader to go “behind the scenes” of a writerly life and, most interestingly, devotes a significant amount of time to amateur science writing, specifically on memory. 

The first part begins with an exposition on involuntary autobiographical memory (IAM), setting the tone for the main preoccupation of the book: Memory. Barnes takes a clinical as well as a literary approach to dissecting the topic — apart from discussing how the body stores and retrieves memories, he also goes on at some length about Marcel Proust’s In Search of Lost Time, one of the most famous examples of using memory as a plot device in literature. 

The very first page, in fact, presents the reader with Barnes’ views on memory: He calls it “that place where degradation and embellishment overlap”. Throughout the book, he has the tendency to take his audience down one path, only to present a revisionist version in the next few pages. He also drops in occasional reminders that he is speaking from the vantage point of someone who has been around for eight decades and has documented a sizeable chunk of that period. This he achieves by first writing about his recollections of a particular period of his life, and then going back to how he had actually recorded that period as it was unfolding. This is an almost professorial “method in madness” in the way he exposes the shakiness of memory, in both theory and practice. 

Fiction, or what Barnes calls the “slow composting of life before it becomes useable material”, is the other major theme of Departure(s). The narrator, despite having promised his friends Stephen and Jean that he would never fictionalise their story, ends up doing it anyway. Moreover, he never gives the readers a good enough reason for this act of transgression. Perhaps, it is done to probe the idea of the author as “god” — it is the narrator who introduces Stephen and Jean when the three are at university together, and then reintroduces them when they are in late middle-age. Even though both Stephen and Jean reassure him that he has nothing to do with their story beyond the point of introduction, he can’t help feeling in some way responsible for the way things pan out. This invites the reader to wonder if it is merely a disappointment, the kind that one has when one’s friends are unhappy, or if it is a symptom of the author being unable to let go of “controlling” a “story”. 

The book meditates on the blurred lines between fact and fiction, only to arrive at a semi-conclusion that both are governed by memory and because of that, they are not infallible; rather, they are more prone to collapsing into each other. Barnes also guides his readers through his last work, as if he is holding their hand and showing them why he made a particular choice — he talks about how the exercise of establishing his characters and their backgrounds makes him feel “a bit weary”. He is allowing himself one final indulgence as a much-celebrated author, and the process is so endearing that one can see how this would invite newer readers to peruse Barnes’ previous works as well. 

In a cheeky reference to being the aforementioned much-celebrated author, the narrator Julian, while reminiscing about his early cancer detection and diagnosis, uses the trademark British humour to comment on the advantages of celebrity, especially for a highbrow author like him — he is sure to have admirers who suit his sensibility than otherwise. 

There are also journeys into the roots of Barnes’ storytelling itself: The people he has encountered all his life and the stories they have shared with him, despite (or because of) him being an author. 

Memory is not just a motif in Departure(s). Its science and its whimsy come together to form an unforgettable goodbye from an author to his audience; and also an homage to the act of being alive from someone who has spent his life documenting the intricacies of living.