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.

While ‘Carcassonne’ is not typical of the stories in Pulse, it is typical of a strand of Barnes’ writing familiar to those who enjoyed Flaubert’s Parrot. This has been described by Frank Kermode as ‘Menippean satire’ (‘a form of intellectually humorous work characterised by miscellaneous contents, displays of curious erudition, and comical discussions on philosophical topics’). If you enjoy this sort of thing, then you will certainly enjoy Pulse. But if you do not, there is plenty more to like.

The story in Pulse that comes closest to ‘Carcassone’ and Flaubert’s Parrot is ‘Harmony’, since this too reaches out, self-consciously, beyond fiction to history and back again.