What Book to Read?

True to form, I’m reading the 2011 Man Booker Prize winner nearly a year late; the short-list for 2012 was announced on 11 September. Also pretty much true to form – see some of my other reviews of Man Booker winners – I wouldn’t have voted for it. I haven’t yet read anything by any other of the 2011 short-listed candidates, so it may have been the best of the bunch. But I wouldn’t bet on it.

This short novel is described as a meditation on memory, ageing and regret. Tony Webster is middle aged, middle class, retired from his job as an arts administrator, divorced, but on friendly terms with his ex-wife and daughter. He tells his story in two parts. In the first, he reflects on his youth, his last year at school, his time at university, and the period just after. He knows he may not be remembering things as they really happened. These are ‘approximate memories which time has deformed into certainties,’ he says. ‘If I can’t be sure of the actual events any more, I can at least be true to the impression those facts left.’ What he recalls in particular is Adrian, a friend from school, and Veronica, his first girlfriend. After they break up, Veronica goes out with Adrian. In the second part, he tells how he has now been left a small bequest and another document in the will of Veronica’s mother, whom he met only once. This prompts him to try and find out why she left anything at all to him. What is the relationship between what he remembers, and what he now finds documentation of?

Questions about an understanding of the past – ie history – are central to the novel. Early in the story a history class debates the nature of historical responsibility – an important issue in the book. But what is history? Tony’s history teacher asks this question of his students. Tony suggests it’s the lies of the victors, which in a sense sums up the first part of his account, he being the ‘victor’ in the sense that it is his version we are reading – though equally it could be ‘the self-delusions of the defeated’. His friend Colin suggests it is cyclical, events essentially repeating themselves. And yes, there are at least two crucial elements that seem to be repeated in this story. Then Adrian quotes a (fictional) French thinker, saying history is ‘that certainty produced at the point where the imperfections of memory meet the inadequacies of documentation.’ Yes, of course we were pretentious,’ Tony admits. But pretentious or not, everything else revolves around such imperfections of memory and inadequacies of documentation. The unreliable narrator is a fairly common literary trope – I’ve even reviewed a couple of examples (Balthasar’s Odyssey, by Amin Maalouf and the classic Agatha Christie The Murder of Roger Ackroyd). But in this case, unreliability is woven into the structure of the story. Fiction is necessarily contrived, but I can’t help feeling that here it is contrived to make a historiographical point, rather than a good story. I’m not sure what the point is, though.

It seems that the title of this book is the same as that of a book of essays by the literary critic Frank Kermode, published in 1965. This can hardly be a coincidence, so in order better to understand Barnes’s book, I had a look at some of the essays. Kermode says he is trying ‘to make sense of the ways we try to make sense of our lives.’ Barnes seems to be saying that the sense we often make of our lives is illusory, because based on unreliable memories. As Adrian says, ‘we need to know the history of the historian in order to understand the version that is being put in front of us’. Not a lot of help. How can we know ourselves, if the narratives we construct about our past lack all objectivity?

Barnes’s book, and its award of the Man Booker Prize, were mostly greeted with critical acclaim. He has been praised for the ‘intricate’ structure of the novel, for the ‘precision’ as well as ‘the nuances of language’. But I couldn’t help agreeing with one critic who said it ‘occasionally feels more like a series of wise, underline-worthy insights than a novel’.

You can read more about Julian Barnes on his informative website here.

PS. Veronica has a ‘comfort book’ – I Capture the Castle – which happens to be one of my favourite comfort books, though most people don’t seem to have heard of it. It’s by Dodie Smith. Not sure what this says about either of us, but I’ll write about it one day.