‘Levels of Life’, by Julian Barnes – review

‘You put together two things that have not been put together before and sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn’t.’ In this slim book Julian Barnes puts not two but three things together: nonfiction, fiction and memoir. And sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn’t.

The first section is an elegant and breezy account of the early days of ballooning and the development of aerial photography. Here are the adventurer Colonel Frederick Burnaby, the actress Sarah Bernhardt, and the photographer Félix Tournachon (otherwise known as Nadar): ‘The enthusiastic English amateur, the most famous actress of her era, making a celebrity flight, and the professional balloonist’.

Barnes’s second section is a fictional or, at least, conjectural account of the love-affair between Burnaby and Bernhardt — one that left him stricken when he proposed marriage and she rejected him. She said often that she loved him, but would not promise that she would always do so.