NOTHING TO BE FRIGHTENED OF by Julian Barnes (Jonathan Cape 2008)

For eight years I’ve been meaning to read this book, yet somehow the time’s never been quite right. An urgency to find it struck after my father’s death last year, but pressing events took over. Even if I had found it, I wouldn’t have read it just then, because, immediately after this sad loss, I suffered my first, and hopefully only, attack of reading paralysis. At last, this June I went to the UBS to buy Nothing To Be Frightened Of only to be told it wasn’t in stock. That same day I went to a second hand book shop – no luck. Thanks to the Dunedin Public Library, after a quick phone call, I found the right book at the right time. Or the right book found me.

To understand the irony of its title you have to read this book. You have to read it anyway, it’s just so well written. A laugh a page, or at least a wry smile, Julian Barnes paradoxically brings his subject, death, to life. The genre is hard to quantify: an atheist’s confession of timor mortis embedded in a personal memoir. It includes a lively and at times laugh-out-loud discussion with the author’s brother, a professor of philosophy, who replied to Julian Barnes’s opening statement, “I don’t believe in God, but I miss Him”, an announcement of the book’s theme, with a single word: “Soppy”. This honest, to the point of raw, memoir is interwoven with a ‘lite’ scholarly look at the last days and words of writers and composers. Much fun is had with ironic quotes and potted bios of celebs, in particular the French writer, Jules Renard, to make the (rather obvious) point that famous lives all lead via a variety of routes to the cemetery,

The family dynamics are engrossing. The author, aged sixty at the time of writing, describes in poignant detail the illnesses and deaths of his parents, his thwarted relationship with them, and rekindles memories of his maternal grandparents’ lives, including a mystery woman defaced in a photo that belonged to his grandfather. This personal part of the book reads as if Barnes badly needed to get it off his chest in order to move on. But ridiculously, given the heartfelt descriptions of ambivalence, anger and grief, Barnes denies this is a cathartic book. Certainly there is more to it than catharsis. He neatly employs the mystery woman with her scratched out face in his grandparents’ photo album as a springboard to analyse the novelist’s job and discuss motives for being a writer.

What is the point of writing? This is the hidden agenda and central question of this book all about death. At the heart of his fascinating musings, Barnes manifests the solipsism (a word he uses to condemn his mother) and opportunism of the professional writer: 

“. . . when I am roared awake in the enveloping and predictive darkness, I try to fool myself that there is at least one temporary advantage. This isn't just another routine bout of timor mortis, I say to myself. This is research for your book”.

I admire and identify with his attitude. Towards the end of the book he comes clean: 

“Fiction is made by a process which combines total freedom and utter control, which balances precise observation with the free play of the imagination, which uses lies to tell the truth and truth to tell lies. It is both centripetal and centrifugal. It wants to tell all stories, in all their contrariness, contradiction and irresolvability; at the same time it wants to tell the one true story, the one that smelts and refines and resolves all other stories The novelist is both bloody back-row cynic and lyric poet . . .”

Well put. As are all the reflections in this excellent book that on publication received an undeserved brutish review in The Daily Telegraph (known in our house as The Daily Torygraph), the main criticism being that Julian Barnes is ‘clever’. The whiff of professional jealousy unmistakable and unsurprising since Julian Barnes is a tall poppy without peer among English contemporary writers. No wonder I couldn’t find it in the book shops! This book may not be as well known as the others by Julian Barnes, but it has all the hallmarks of his brilliance: witty, elegant, informative and wry, underpinned by a pervasive sadness.