Autobiographical details, like allusions to Barnes’ life in Oxford, are strewn around. | Photo Credit: Getty Images/iStock

Is Julian Barnes’ latest and final book a work of fiction or autofiction, a memoir or make-believe? Barnes declares within the first few pages of Departure(s) that “[t]here will be a story—or a story within the story” and that “[t]his will be my last book”. The reminder resurfaces soon after; “What follows is a true story, though it comes with several caveats.” Is this a declaration from the writer himself or a tease by the narrator?

Several autobiographical details are strewn around: allusions to Barnes’ “incurable but manageable” blood cancer diagnosed a few years ago, to his first wife, Pat, his Booker Prize win, to life in Oxford (“you can google that if you wish”). The narrator, a man in his mid-70s, is also called Julian Barnes. But even if this is Julian Barnes, the writer himself, is the book an autobiography?

After all, memory itself, as Barnes keeps telling us, is fragile and slippery, a subjective rendering of things past (“that place where degradation and embellishment overlap”). He does draw on contemporaneous diaries and notes but adds that “it would be foolish to deduce that these detailed annotations of life amount to what actually happened”.

The act of remembering is one of the chief preoccupations of Departure(s), as it has been through Barnes’ oeuvre. The opening section is a long meditation on memory, with a nod to Proust’s madeleine and the power of nostalgic triggers. You might wonder where this is all going, with no coherent story in the traditional sense taking shape; that is partly the point.

Best man and traitor

But, as promised, there is a story within the story. That is the one about Stephen and Jean, friends of Barnes from university, who had a brief but ill-fated romance as students. Through the good offices of Barnes (“like a deus ex machina at the end of a play”), they give it another shot late in life. Barnes has a ring-side view of the romance, though he concedes that this story only has a beginning and an end; he has not been privy to the happenings in the middle part of their lives. At their wedding, he is the best man. But he is also a traitor.

Although he promised never to write about them, to the extent of swearing on the Bible, here he is, doing just that. He pauses to examine the ethics of betraying his friends. And later muses: “I had treated Stephen and Jean as if they were characters in one of my novels.” As other reviews have noted, he has indeed done precisely this; versions of Stephen and Jean have appeared in his previous work.

Barnes pleads guilty to moral turpitude. Even as he explains himself elsewhere: “Mostly I write fiction, which requires the slow composting of life before it becomes useable material, and I have no notion at the time what might or might not break down into fictional possibility.”

The book has dollops of sly humour and cheeky self-deprecation. It skips between the Stephen-Jean story, Barnes’ health, writers and writing. Mortality is the other chief theme here, as it has been previously with Barnes. The sense of an ending—of both a career and a life—looms large, starting with the book’s title itself. Stories of dead friends and family members dot the pages. When Barnes’ cancer diagnosis arrives, he sees it not as a death sentence but as a “life sentence: sentenced to live with my cancer until I died”.

The book is shot through with asides and diary entries, observations from hospital visits and his own role in the doomed romance plot; the artifice of the novelist is laid bare, the curtain pulled back. Jean even ticks him off at one point: “This hybrid stuff you do—I think it’s a mistake.” This tug between fiction and essay, between narrative and internal debate, animates the book.

Such an exercise might have come off as mannered or self-indulgent in the hands of a less skilful writer. The meta-fictional universe, the self-reflexive conceits. But Barnes pulls off this hybrid mix of philosophy, anecdote, analysis, all the time inviting you to doubt the truth/fictiveness of the story he tells and the narrator telling it. Departure(s) is also a slim book, and Barnes does not belabour his point.

He has said in interviews that this will be his last book as he has “played all [his] tunes”. The goodbye is firm, the fourth wall decisively broken for one final address. “I hope you’ve enjoyed our relationship over the years. I certainly have,” he concludes. Yes, we have. It is an elegant, tidy book to go out on.

Bhavya Dore is a freelance journalist who writes for various Indian and international publications.

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