Book review: Departure(s) by Julian Barnes (Jonathan Cape, £18.99)

After recently hearing Julian Barnes interviewed by Katy Razzall on BBC radio about his latest (and final) book, DEPARTURE(S), yesterday I picked up a copy on impulse at the appropriately named Barnes Bookshop. Even better, I saw it was a Signed Copy, though, on reflection, I’d far rather have stood before him, and have it personally signed. (There’s nothing quite like that author experience.) It is a slim book, at just 158pp, and whilst there is some debate as to whether it is, indeed, a novel, I resolved to read it as such. Cleverly, Barnes plays with the concept of whether what he’s writing is, or isn’t, fiction. There’s a central story about a couple, Jean and Stephen, whom the narrator first helps get together during their university days, and whom he assists in also getting together later in life. But the book is much more than this, because, as the age of 80, the author is in a reflective mood. Barnes deals with his own illness, his failing memory, and the physical changes he experiences with a humorous curiosity that I found touching, and the book is sparely and elegantly written. I was captivated by it over a late afternoon and evening; that’s all the time it took to read. In particular, his tender descriptions of the elderly Jack Russell dog he lives with are delightful. There are a host of thoughtful lines to savour here, but it is perhaps his musings on his relationship with his readers that struck me as especially poignant. ‘I shall “miss” you - whatever that means,’ he says, at the end. After I’d finished, I searched my bookshelf and eventually found my 1983 copy of METROLAND, Barnes’s first novel, which I’d thoroughly enjoyed. To have read his first and last novels stretched across time strikes me as rather wonderful.

DEPARTURE(S) by Julian Barnes (Jonathan Cape, £18.99)

METROLAND by Julian Barnes and DEPARTURE(S) by Julian Barnes