If Levels of Life by Julian Barnes went into flying, ballooning, and grieving—covering the highs and lows of life in a deliberately asymmetrical but brilliant memoir following his wife Pat Kavanagh’s death in 2008—his new book mixes fact and fiction in the aftermath of his own ‘manageable’ blood cancer diagnosis. A condition he will die with, but not of. Departure(s), which comes out around his 80th birthday, will be his last and final novel, says the Booker-winning author. Which explains the title, with the ‘s’ in brackets pluralising many mortalities, including the death of love in a relationship.
The narrative enfolds a couple who may or may not be real. Who made him promise he wouldn’t ever incorporate them into his fiction, but here they are. Like Levels of Life, this book, too, tackles a two-track narrative. There’s the honesty of illness and the fog of fiction, where two old friends figure large in an almost love story. Memory is the common factor: nostalgia and reminiscences are powerful emotional states. And while burnt toast should bring back a kind of memory to him, it simply does not.
Barnes dives deep into what it is that we do remember: what we think we remember vs. what we want to remember. The sheer opacity of what is considered most transparent. Is it possible to remember everything all at once? If the past is so here, how does one live the present? Involuntary autobiographical memory (IAM), rote-learning memory, spontaneous memory. He remembers ‘the smell of the glue and varnish I used when constructing model aircraft, or the aroma of frying bacon, or that of a damp golden retriever’. But is the brain just toying with us?
While ‘sleeping 11 hours and then taking an afternoon nap: cancer, chemo age’ and starting to write self-pityingly about ‘Jules was’ in which he scribbled ‘This is the start of the ending’ and ‘I live in the present, but my future is to exist only in the past’, Barnes reconnects with an old friend. Stephen ‘then said some nice things – by which I don’t mean words of praise, but rather something writers after a few years crave even more: an accurate representation of, and correct response to, something they’ve written’.
Playing involuntary Cupid, the author reunites a pair of lovers in middle age, a couple he had introduced to each other in college. Stephen starts to date Jean once again. Does the couple stay together the second time when they didn’t the first time? ‘Happiness,’ Jean said, ‘doesn’t make me happy.’
Barnes mostly writes fiction, ‘which requires the slow composting of life before it becomes usable material…’ Many writers and non-writers are doomed to never forget. I remember what people wore and said with clarity, but have learnt over the years to neither blurt it out nor keep in the forefront of my mind, seeing that it simply creeps them out. No one wants to hear what they once said about the person they are now married to. Too much memory is a nuisance, a useless abundance of details that must be cherry-picked constantly. And each one of us comes to some sort of pact with self about how and when and what to recall. A personal history that won’t be self-conscious curation but a factual record.
His medical condition has Barnes in typical Barnes style, studying the matter of partings. The smaller ones that dot life as we go along, like doing katti with a crush, the medium ones of an author declaring this is his last work, and the bigger ones that loom large as we age. He says: Being brave, or being shit-scared, or occupying a midpoint of stubborn self-deception, don’t alter anything. ‘It’s not the sort of cancer that I can feel responsible for, and therefore guilty about. Oh, if only I hadn’t smoked/drunk so much/eaten so much ultra-processed food…’ He knows that ‘it’s a cancer rooted in the universe’s utter indifference’.
Barnes is witty and chatty, and wonderfully articulate about everything in this book, intertwining all kinds of goodbyes in the most honest way. Still, I mourn his decision not to write again, just as I mourn my own inability to live forever as a reader. Ageing is iffy terrain—I don’t recommend it.