Elizabeth Finch by Julian Barnes 2022

In this, his 25th book, Barnes has given us a special gift.  I fell in and out of love with this book several times, a tribute to Barnes’ story telling and character development and a much more interesting reading experience than just loving or hating a book.

The book is divided into three sections, unimaginatively titled, One, Two and Three.  Each section focuses on a different character in this novel which has essentially no action but is a beautifully rendered depiction of three different characters, the eponymous Elizabeth, a Roman Emperor Julian the Apostate (I don’t think the choice among all Roman emperors of one whose name is the same as our author was an accident!), and the narrator, Neil.  We meet these three when a 30-something Neil enrolls in a course entitled Culture and Civilization in an adult extension school of the University of London.  Finch is the professor and quite a package is she!  I found myself totally taken with her pedagogical techniques, posing questions and engaging the students in the bigger pictures and questions beyond dates and names.  This first part of the book led me to think back over the women teachers now surely all gone who had made a difference in my life—Lucille Kerwin my 6th grade teacher,  who shook me by the shoulder and got me to stop goofing off and take school seriously; Miss Locker who first showed me the wonders of science and how the world is organized in 7th grade; Dorothy Schlitt who helped me make the correct choice between my science project and my sputtering baseball career in high school; Violet Zielke who brought me the wonders of Virgil, Cicero, and Caesar in four years of high school Latin.  Finch has elements of all four of them in her wonderfully realized personality and presence.

One of her favorite key historical moments that she felt had changed the world forever was the death of the Roman Emperor Julian, dubbed the Apostate because he embraced a polytheistic, animal sacrificing Hellenistic paganism at the critical moment that Christianity was facing a real question of survival.  When Julian died in battle in Persia in 363 AD, Christianity with its intolerance and its rigidity became dominant, altering forever the course of European and world history.  Julian has remained a focus of fascination among authors from Montaigne to Milton, Voltaire to Gibbon, and Ibsen through Swinburne (with an aside to Hitler’s diaries) and provides the through line for Finch’s exploration of history, culture, religion, and civilization.

The third and final major presence in this book is Neil, the narrator whom we first meet as a student in Finch’s class and say farewell to on his death bed at the end of the book.  His struggle to understand Finch’s teachings and more so her being in the world is the primary driver of the novel as he inherits her books and files at her death and then attempts to put them into a biography of his beloved teacher.

If it sounds as if not much happens in this book, you’re correct.  On the other hand, there is some wonderful writing and some profound observations about religion, history, and choices.  My belief is that Barnes’s book is all about how we articulate our life’s narrative, the narrative each one of us provides for our own lives and the narratives that biographers provide for others.  It reminds me of the Bob Seger line in his song, Against the Wind, “what to leave in, what to leave out.”  At one point, Neil says, “I sometimes wonder how biographers do it: make a life, a living life, a glowing life, a coherent life out of all that circumstantial, contradictory, and missing evidence.”  He goes on to try to do so for Elizabeth, later pondering that “She’d give you the conclusion but not the narrative.  Why? The obvious, normal reason would be a sense of privacy, of discretion. But I decided that it was also perhaps something bigger: a sense that a life, much as we would like it to be, does not amount to a narrative—or  not a narrative such as we understand and expect.”  In the final pages, or as Neil refers to it “at this late stage”, he observes that “I thought of Julian, and how the centuries had interpreted and reinterpreted him, like a man walking across a stage pursued by different-colored spotlights.  Oh, he was red, no, more like orange, no, he was indigo verging on black, no, he was all black.  It seems to me, if in a less dramatic and extreme way, that this is what happens when we look at anyone’s life: how they are seen by their parents, friends, lovers, enemies, children; by passing strangers who suddenly notice a truth about them, or by long-term friends who hardly understand them at all.  And then they look at us, in a manner different from how we look at ourselves. Well, getting our history wrong is part of being a person.”

I loved this book and I hope from these few quotes  that you will decide to read it as well.  Major Addendum:  As I often do after I have written my review (and never before writing it), I googled the reviews of Barnes’ book.  Big surprise!!!! The Guardian, the New York Times, and the Washington Post reviewers all panned the book in rather uncompromising terms.  I stopped looking for other reviews after the third thumbs down, and I’m pleased that I didn’t read these reviews before writing my own.  I still loved the book—professional reviewers be damned!