Even Flaubert’s Parrot Will Perish

Nothing to Be Frightened Of
By Julian Barnes
Alfred A. Knopf, 244 pages, $24.95

I’m borderline obsessed by Philip Larkin’s poem “Aubade.” It’s a pitiless meditation on death; a frank confession of fear; a swift rebuke to religion (“That vast, moth-eaten musical brocade”); and a weary recognition that despite the dread moment of personal extinction, life will go on—dawn will come again:

Meanwhile telephones crouch, getting ready to ring
In locked-up offices, and all the uncaring
Intricate rented world begins to rouse.

I’m particularly hung up on the word “rented.” We live in a rented world—and the landlord, alas, can evict us without any notice whatsoever.

In Nothing to Be Frightened Of, his own meandering, book-length meditation on mortality, Julian Barnes calls “Aubade” Larkin’s “great death-poem.” (I like that hyphen.) Mr. Barnes quotes the death-poem three times (once without attribution), and just before the second time, casually borrows “rented.” (“To have a low opinion of this rented world was logical, indeed essential, for a Christian.”)

Though he clearly admires “rented,” the word that really gets him going is “nothing.” He helpfully tips us off to the punning use of it in his title with this snippet from his diary, recorded, he tells us, 20 years ago:

“People say of death, ‘There’s nothing to be frightened of.’ They say it quickly, casually. Now let’s say it again, slowly, with re-emphasis. ‘There’s NOTHING to be frightened of.’ Jules Renard: ‘The word that is most true, most exact, most filled with meaning, is the word “nothing.”’”

Larkin again:

… this is what we fear—no sight, no sound,
No touch or taste or smell, nothing to think with,
Nothing to love or link with. …

I wonder whether Mr. Barnes’ exhaustively documented case of timor mortis (“Only a couple of nights ago, there came again that alarmed and alarming moment, of being pitchforked back into consciousness, awake, alone, utterly alone, beating pillow with fist and shouting ‘Oh no Oh No OH NO’ in an endless wail …”) comes from feeling he owns his life, and that death is an unwarranted repossession, unfair to him in particular. His life will be snatched away, voiding the terms of a valid sales contract. Would it help if he could conceive of it as a lease set to expire?

THE COVER OF Nothing to Be Frightened Of is a striking close-up of the author’s face. He’s staring apprehensively at the camera, not quite afraid, but not composed, either. If you’re going to read the book, get used to the face. “I”— the first word on the first page—crops up with a frequency that requires acknowledgment: “I, the insistent, emphatic, italicized me,” he calls it. “The I to which I am brutishly attached, the I that must be farewelled.”

This ubiquitous “I” has the witty, sophisticated, entertaining style we’re familiar with from Mr. Barnes’ most famous novel, Flaubert’s Parrot (1984). Though his contemplation of the grave—“pit-gazing,” he calls it—is by definition morbid, he’s too clever to let it descend into dirge. He strikes a teetering balance between pit-gazing and navel-gazing.

He’s funny, and he knows a lot, especially about 19th-century French literary history. Nothing to Be Frightened Of is crowded with loosely linked anecdotes about writers such as Flaubert (natch) and Zola and Daudet, all of whom had instructive pensées about death and dying. Jules Renard, who kick-started Mr. Barnes’ enthusiasm for “nothing,” and who wrote in his journal, “Irony does not dry up the grass. It just burns off the weeds”—nice line—is a particularly welcome presence.

So is Julian’s brother, Jonathan Barnes, a bracingly grumpy older sibling who plays the debunking straight man to the fanciful novelist.

I wish their mother and her “relentless solipsism” (a good portion of which she passed on to her younger son) were equally engaging. The father was silent, reserved, long-suffering. An aptly awkward sentence: “In all my remembered life, he never told me that he loved me; nor did I reply in kind.” I now know more than I ever wanted to about the Barnes parents and grandparents, their marriage, old age and inevitable demise.

JULES RENARD: “ONE COULD say of almost all works of literature that they are too long.”

Julian Barnes: “Maybe all this … pit-gazing, this attempt to make death, if not your friend, at least your familiar enemy—to make death boring, even to bore death itself with your attention—maybe this is not the right approach after all.” Death isn’t really boreable, but the rest of us are.

There are many refrains in Nothing to Be Frightened Of (including “we are all amateurs in and of our own lives”), but there’s no forward progress, no narrative arc. (Instead of beginning, middle and end, we get end, end and end.) Mr. Barnes never claims to have learned anything from his foray into thanatology; it hasn’t made him any wiser or any less frightened. And he was already plenty clever at the start.

But then it’s all over, at long last: Julian Barnes has done death, thoroughly. Intellectually speaking, he’s now released into the hereafter and is experiencing life after death. Which would make his next novel—we await it eagerly—posthumous.

Adam Begley edits the Observer Review of Books. He can be reached at books@observer.com.