Where to start with Julian Barnes: a guide to his best fiction

Barnes was interested in the Booker Prize long before he won it. In 1987, he wrote of his time as a Booker follower, lamenting the days of generous bookmakers’ odds, ‘when some of us cleaned up on Salman Rushdie at 14-1’, and telling the story of the Booker judge who threw one submitted novel out of a train window after 20 pages, only to find himself wearing a polite smile on stage when his fellow judges subsequently awarded it the prize. It was here that Barnes coined the immortal term ‘posh bingo’ to describe the Booker. ‘You should treat it as a game,’ he said elsewhere – warning that otherwise it tends to drive writers mad. 

So he pronounced himself ‘relieved’ to win the Booker Prize in 2011, on his fourth shortlisting. The Sense of an Ending was the first novel Barnes wrote following the death of his wife, the literary agent Pat Kavanagh, and it is suffused with memory and loss. The narrator, Tony, is a retired and lonely man. ‘I had wanted life not to bother me too much, and had succeeded – and how pitiful that was.’ He is divorced and finds himself increasingly drawn to the past, and in particular to an experience with a girlfriend back in his less quiet teenage years. 

The meticulously worked-out plot involves an attempt to recover a schoolfriend’s diary, and The Sense of an Ending makes a perfect starting point for Barnes newcomers because it blends so many of his themes in a short, elegant tale. It is serious but not solemn. It seems to offer a key to elements of Barnes’s own life, including his (temporary) falling-out with old friend Martin Amis. And it reminds us that, as William Faulkner wrote, ‘The past is never dead. It’s not even past.’ 

‘I wish he’d shut up about Flaubert,’ Kingsley Amis once said to one of Barnes’s friends. That was never likely to happen. Writing that bubbles up from Barnes’s love for the French novelist Gustave Flaubert, like his love for France, could populate a whole list in itself – but let’s stick with the most obvious example. Flaubert’s Parrot (1984) was Barnes’s first Booker shortlisting, and showed how he could be delightfully experimental and deeply readable at the same time. The narrator is Geoffrey Braithwaite, a doctor who fills the void left from his wife’s death by pursuing an all-you-can-eat approach to researching – and following – the great writer. ‘He died little more than a hundred years ago, and all that remains of him is paper.’ 

Braithwaite takes us on a voyage around his idol, sharing Flaubert’s wit and wisdom – ‘Whatever else happens,’ he wrote after the Franco-Prussian war broke out, ‘we shall remain stupid’ – and telling his story in unique ways. One chapter takes the form of an exam paper, another questions our ideas of definitive truth by providing two chronologies of Flaubert’s life: one giving a positive view (‘1880: Full of honour, widely loved, and still working hard to the end, Gustave Flaubert dies at Croisset’), and the other negative (‘1880: Impoverished, lonely and exhausted, Gustave Flaubert dies’). The book is half-essay, half-fiction, pure Barnes. Above all it is a celebration of literature itself. ‘Books are where things are explained to you. Life is where they aren’t,’ writes Braithwaite. ‘I’m not surprised some people prefer books.’ 

Five years later, Barnes renewed his experimental credentials with A History of the World in 10½ Chapters, a novel made of thematically linked stories (a trick five-time Booker nominee David Mitchell would adopt in 2004 for his shortlisted Cloud Atlas). It begins with an account of Noah’s ark from the point of view of woodworm hiding among the planks, works through the hijacking of a cruise ship by terrorists, then a court case against more woodworm in medieval France for damaging a church – and ends not on land or sea at all, but in heaven. As is typical with Barnes, fact blends with fiction (the court case, or something like it, really happened), and the book’s vast ambition is made less intimidating by Barnes’s usual down-to-earth wit and approachability. One critic said of the book, ‘At last the English novel seems to have got its balls back,’ which came as a surprise to those of us who hadn’t noticed that they were missing. 

Barnes had a relatively slow start to his writing life. ‘I was an unconfident and late-arriving first novelist.’ His friends and contemporaries made a big splash from the 1970s, with linguistic verve (Salman Rushdie), controversially eye-catching subject matter (Ian McEwan), or both (Martin Amis). By contrast, Barnes’s first novel Metroland – which took him seven years to write – wasn’t published until 1980 and it fitted the expected mould: a clever young man’s novel about a clever young man. Philip Larkin liked it, ‘despite my prejudice against books about people under 21’. 

But he took off quickly after that. In his 2008 story ‘Knowing French’, Barnes advises an imaginary fan not to read his second novel, Before She Met Me (1982). But I disagree. It is perhaps the most surprising book in a career of surprising books: a twisted psychological thriller, disguised by Barnes’s usual smoothness and erudition. Graham is a married man living a quiet life: ‘At thirty-eight, it felt a bit like being retired already.’ His life is jolted when he meets another woman, actress Ann, but then, projecting his own infidelity, he is seized by retrospective sexual jealousy: of Ann’s love life ‘before she met me’. In one sense this is an early rendition of a recurring Barnes theme – ‘how strange the ways in which the past caught up and tugged at the present’ – but it is also a portrait of dangerous monomania, where Graham spirals into a madness that sees him mailing animal offal to actors who played Ann’s lover in films. There are plenty of Barnes’s witty observations – a teenage boy skimming a book for sex scenes finds that ‘a practised eye could make words like “brassiere”, “bosom” and “loins” stand out from the text as if printed in bold type’ – but it’s the horror of Graham’s descent that sticks in the mind, all the way to the shocking but inevitable ending. (Barnes, in fact, had form in writing books with frank sex and violence.) 

‘Undoubtedly much too good to win the Booker Prize,’ wrote the author and critic Stanley Reynolds of Barnes’s 1986 novel, Staring at the Sun, which probably said more about Reynolds than about the prize. But the book is certainly one of Barnes’s best, and deserving of more attention. It tells the story of one woman, Jean Serjeant, from her childhood in the 1920s to her old age in the distant future (gulp) of 2020. We see Jean’s life through her experiences with men: an uncle, a lover, a fighter pilot, a son. And there is a pleasure on every page because Barnes loves to play. He plays with words (even in the way his heroine’s forename is contained within her surname). He plays with unanswerable questions, both trivial (Why didn’t Charles Lindbergh eat all the sandwiches he brought on his Atlantic crossing?) and profound: ‘How do you tell a good life from a bad life, a wasted life?’ And he plays with ideas, where the section set in 2020, with remarkable prescience, features both digitised access to books and an artificial intelligence system that – just like the AI models being promoted now – doesn’t know the difference between knowledge and intelligence. The fine blending of storytelling with essayistic reflections on life is classic Barnes – nobody does it better.