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Tuesday 2 December 2008

Nothing to Be Frightened Of

No getting away from it

Simon Baker on Julian Barnes' new book

Jules Renard, the writer most frequently quoted in Barnes’s book, said, ‘It is when faced with death that we turn most bookish.’ Barnes, in this death-facing work, quotes or alludes to an enormous number of writers, and a fair number of composers, mining them for death-related biographical details, thoughts on death and, naturally, famous last words (many of which are so self-consciously lapidary that it is a relief to see included Housman’s endearing sign off, delivered to the doctor who gave him a final injection — ‘Beautifully done’). Renard himself observed, on the subject of his mother’s fatal and tragicomic tumble down a well, ‘Death is not an artist’. There are hints throughout of Flaubert’s Parrot in the way that Barnes uses Renard’s life as a method of subtly drawing the reader’s attention elsewhere; one thinks of Geoffrey Braithwaite’s commentary on Flaubert and the feeling we have that there is another story — Braithwaite’s own — lying just out of view.

It is in its occasional over-reliance on quotations that this book is weakest. While the quotations themselves are rarely dull, their sheer volume makes this seem, in places, like a ‘best of death’ compilation rather than the original work that, for the most part, it is. The more enjoyable passages, in contrast, are those in which Barnes sets out his own far-ranging, and often highly insightful, thoughts on death. One of the most interesting things he notes is that he will have a last reader — not a figurative person but a real one, after which his work will never be looked at again by anyone. At first Barnes salutes this person, but then wittily changes his mind and begins to berate him for not recommending his writing to others.

Perhaps unsurprisingly, one quotation does not make its way into this book. In his Memoirs, Kingsley Amis commented unfavourably on a short section from Philip Larkin’s late masterpiece ‘Aubade’, a poem about waking at dawn and feeling the approach of death. Concerning its bleak tone, Amis wrote: ‘If you feel as bad as you say then f*****g get up, or if it’s too early or something then put the light on and read Dick Francis.’ If you can summon up such a breezy, unconcerned outlook, you will probably be fine. However, if, like many, you find your attitude towards death rather less robust, leaning more towards pillow-thumping and bookishness, Nothing to Be Frightened Of will prove an erudite and sensitive companion, though sadly, of course, it won’t change your long-term prospects.

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