A pitiful wreck

When I look at the black-and-white photograph of Julian Barnes on the flap of his latest book, the voice of Kenneth Clark floats up from memories of the black-and-white television of my childhood: ‘He is smiling — the smile of reason.’ Supremely ‘civilised’, thin-lipped, faintly superior, temperamentally given to aphorism, it is no surprise to discover that Julian Barnes is a Chevalier de l’Ordre des Arts et des Lettres.

Yet Barnes in his fiction is unlike the simplified Voltaire of Clark’s Civilisation. His novels never proclaim the triumph of reason: instead, they explore the dark and disruptive, uncivilised emotions on the edge of words — love, certainly, but also jealousy, paranoia, inconsolable grief and the fear of dying. His cool, detached prose, controlled and controlling, may seem inappropriate for such subjects; but it adds to the shock when something uncivilisable surfaces through ratiocination — ‘the crocodile’s snout in the lily pond’, as Barnes once put it. That apparently know-it-all smile is misleading: what Barnes makes us feel is the limitations of reason, and that no one can know it all (or is it a very superior form of superiority that is indistinguishable from humility?)

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Barnes is particularly un-French in his instinctive distrust of the theorising so beloved of the Left Bank. His latest novel — if that is the right description for a work that many will see only as a prolonged biographical essay upon Shostakovich — is an exposition of the condition of being trapped inside the abstractions of extreme dogma. The self-lacerating composer, conforming under Stalin, lashes out against Frenchified theorisers: ‘How easy it was to be a Communist when you weren’t living under Communism,’ he says of Picasso, who ‘sat like a rich man in Paris and the south of France’; and he catches Sartre in the copyright bureau ‘counting out his fat wad of roubles with great care’.