An inspirational teacher: Elizabeth Finch, by Julian Barnes, reviewed

‘Whenever you see a character in a novel, let alone a biography or history book, reduced and neatened into three adjectives, always distrust that description.’ So says the protagonist of Julian Barnes’s latest novel, the poised, droll, epigrammatic Elizabeth Finch, who is loosely modelled on his late friend and fellow Booker Prize-winner Anita Brookner. A lecturer delivering an adult education course on Culture and Civilisation, an exercise she considers ‘rigorous fun’, she introduces her students to figures such as Goethe and Epictetus. Her talks, designed to make them question what they think they know about the past, are peppered with little provocations: ‘We should always distinguish between mutual passion and shared monomania’, for instance; and ‘I happened to be reading Hitler’s Table Talk the other evening.’

We’re exposed to Elizabeth’s idiosyncrasies through the recollections of Neil, one of her students. A former actor, he’s frank about his evasiveness and his embarrassing inability to finish any project, as well as his preoccupation with thoughts of frailty (faith’s, truth’s, his own). Elizabeth, or EF as he and his classmates call her behind her back, intrigues and then obsesses him.

As EF offers her crisply grammatical pronouncements on the legend of St George or the 19th-century impact of rail travel, we may not be wholly convinced of the vaunted originality of her ideas and elegance of her teaching. But for Neil she’s an ‘advisory thunderbolt’, creating starbursts in his head. She jolts him into awareness that history is ‘not something inert and comatose’ but instead ‘active, effervescent, at times volcanic’, and boosts his self-worth when she tells him that acting is ‘the perfect example of artificiality producing authenticity’. On an impulse he asks her out to lunch, and so begins a 20-year extension of that Culture and Civilisation course, which results in his becoming the custodian of her library and papers – and of her myth.