The gentle touch

My main disappointment with this collection of stories was that I had already read six of them, in publications ranging from the New Yorker to the Guardian. This, however, only goes to prove the eagerness with which I seize upon Julian Barnes’ intelligent and subtle writing wherever it may first appear.

Barnes’ two previous collections of short stories were loosely linked by a theme, though this was never overbearing: Cross Channel explored Anglo-French relationships, while The Lemon Table circled bleakly around old age. The stories in Pulse are more tenuously linked — except in so far as this is a collection about the tenuousness of links within human relationships. Indeed, the piece chosen to reprint in the Christmas edition of this magazine, ‘Carcassonne’, comes closest to making this plain; and in a way, it may have been slightly baffling for this not-quite-a-story to have been read in isolation:

What do we trust: the sight of a woman’s feet in walking boots, the novelty of a foreign accent, a loss of blood to the fingertips followed by exasperated self criticism?

All of these examples are references to other stories in the volume — moments when relationships might or do start.