The Thumbnail Book Reviews
by John Q McDonald --- 18 May 2010
by Julian Barnes
In the Monty Python's The Meaning of Life, there is a scene in which Death comes knocking at a dinner party. He glides in, a towering humorless hooded figure with a scythe, and claims all the souls around the table, blaming the salmon mousse for their demise. Even the guest who didn't eat the mousse is guided toward the bright light in the distance. Death is the one inevitability for all of us. It is the one great truth that unites every human being, but it is also the one gruesome truth that we generally avoid talking about. Like Monty Python's dinner guests, we are joined in our mutual fate, and yet we refuse to use it to join with one another in our common humanity. Aside from the sheer number of deaths in Hollywood action movies, surely amounting to some kind of proxy genocide, public deaths from crime and terrorism, and the grim reaper's symbolic figure appearing in pithy New Yorker cartoons, the grotesque reality is usually kept quiet, behind closed doors, and fiercely private. We each face this inevitability, but our culture is engaged in a vast exercise in denial. We live as if we will live forever. Our ego simply cannot grasp the immensity of its own extinction. This intense, witty, intelligent and revealing memoir and essay stares the reality of death straight in the eye and finds (of course) a great deal of anxiety and dread. Early on, Barnes admits to being an agnostic, formerly an atheist, and a thanatophobe; he expects death itself to be the ultimate in nothingness. It is the Nothing to be frightened of. Barnes does, however, examine the expectations of God and the afterlife common to his own cultural upbringing and finds religion wanting. Along the way, he punctuates his ruminations and memories with comments from his brother, a philosopher, comments which are deadly serious but often come off as a hilarious counterpoint to his own thoughts. This is an exploration of his understanding of death, based to a large extent on literary lives and deaths that he has investigated, particularly that of Jules Renard, a French author of a witty and revealing personal journal. But there are many others. We see the thoughts of Zola, Daudet, Flaubert, Stendhal and more. And it is an exploration of Barnes's own fear of death. Here, too, he relies on the deaths of others, his mother and father, people he has known, those who have gone to their ends unexpectedly or entirely in character with their lives. Barnes, who doesn't seem given to much in the way of spiritual musings, finds the consolations of both religion and science insufficient in the face of the infinite void that awaits us all. He wants to find a way to view the Void that would make that final transition easier or more meaningful. He manages to do this with a piercing wit alongside his sense of doom. It is a heavy journey through the book, and the weight of its ultimately tragic message begins to grow heavier by its end. The one consolation that remains is that none of us is truly alone in this journey. The dark inevitable is shared by all of us. Humanity, Barnes reflects, has a 100% mortality rate.
Also by Barnes: [The Sense of an Ending]