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Book Review, 03 April 2008 In search of that extra oomph
Nothing to be Frightened of Julian Barnes thinks of death at least once a day. To some of his friends this seems morbidly frequent; to others, more haunted by death, he seems only mildly afflicted. At the age of 13 or 14 he experienced the réveil mortel, which indeed he likens to the sudden clamour in the dark small hours of an alarm-clock set by the previous occupant of a hotel room. But he discovered that a friend had first heard that death alarm at the unlikely age of four. I was looking forward to reading this book, for death is extremely interesting. Indeed it consumes us all, with various kinds of relish, sweet or bitter. There is, to be sure, a difference between dying and being dead, which Barnes fully explores. Fear of dying, fear of death; he has both. Nor does he ignore the related question of God. At this he worries away, in the 250 pages of his long essay, On God, Barnes establishes a stance early on. When some of those who had heard him on Desert Island Discs wrote to suggest he try prayer or opening himself to faith, he reacted with irritation, because "they did seem to imply that this solution might come as news to me", whereas he had already dismissed Christianity as "approaching extinction in my country". He tells us (on page 34, by which time we might have been able to tell) that this "is not, by the way, ‘my autobiography' ", yet there is plenty about his life and the beliefs and quirks of his parents and grandparents. He decided in his teens that God did not exist, lest the adolescent Barnes be put off masturbating; later in the book he refers back to this incident, so it is meant to be a significant detail. He declares, in discussing his niece's rejection of religion: "I'm glad she has maintained the family tradition of giving up religion on trivial grounds. My brother because he suspected George VI had not gone to heaven; me in order not to be distracted from masturbation." Imagine if, instead of a rejection of religion, these trivial reasons were adduced for giving up reading poetry. People do act for such motives, but we hardly admire them for it. Again, two admissions that Barnes makes illuminate his whole project. First, "I have seen two dead people, and touched one of them; but I've never seen anyone die." Then: "I have never been to a normal church service" (only baptisms, weddings and funerals). There is nothing unusual in such limited experience, except, perhaps, in the author of a book about death and God. Imagine, once more, someone writing a book about painting and happily boasting that he had never voluntarily been to an art gallery. Had the writerly notion never crept up on Julian Barnes that he might visit a "normal church service", even a hospice, an undertaker's, a mortuary? Granted, he is not Dickens, so he need not resort to reportage. Rather, he deliberately preempts prescriptive critics by quoting Ford Madox Ford's remark that they complain about an author's elephant not being a warthog. Barnes is free to make his book any creature he wishes, but does his agnostic elephant have to be such an unadventurous beast, rubbing its rump against the concrete of its zoo enclosure and refusing even to look over the wall at what the Christian warthogs might be up to in theirs? So Barnes' zoo elephant, as it chews its hay, ruminates: "You come into the world, look around, make certain deductions, free yourself from the old bullshit, learn, think, observe, conclude. You believe in your own powers and autonomy; you become your own achievement." Lovely, but some of the "old bullshit" (elsewhere referred to as "bollocks") is integral to the highest achievements of Western art. And this is where Barnes gets interesting. He began his book with the sentence: "I don't believe in God, but I miss him." Fifty pages on, he elaborates. "Missing God is focused for me by missing the underlying sense of purpose and belief when confronted by religious art." It is, Barnes points out, more than failing to recognise the references, though that is a growing problem. He saw a father and son in tracksuits and trainers in Birmingham City Art Gallery briefly approaching the small panel by the fifteenth-century painter Petrus Christus, Christ as the Man of Sorrows, displaying the wound in his side. "Why's that man holding his chest, Dad?" asked the boy. "Dunno," came the reply, as they passed on. But Barnes, who does not wear tracksuits, is not limited, he judges, principally by ignorance. He conducts his own thought experiment: "Imagine reading Giotto's holy strip-cartoon in the chapel at Padua as non-fiction. ... It would - to put it mildly - add a bit of extra oomph, wouldn't it?" Just so. Although Barnes imagines that Christian warthogs are approaching extinction, there are plenty left who do look at those Giotto frescoes as non-fiction. We prefer to hear a Palestrina Mass in church rather than a concert hall. Hearing its music is not strictly a religious experience (and I fear, from some facile remarks about neurological experiments, that Barnes supposes religion is chiefly a matter of experience), but the music finds its context in Christian worship. Being a Christian need not make anyone a sensitive aesthete, but if he already detects the sublime in art, then, in Barnes' deliberately demotic phrase, it does add a bit of extra oomph. For Barnes, who writes here self-consciously as a "writer", a novel "tells beautiful, shapely lies which enclose hard, exact truths". And, although he thinks that "religions were the first great inventions of the fiction writers", he condemns religion as "a beautiful, shapely story containing hard, exact lies". This is too neat to bear analysis. Neither Barnes nor the Christians adhere to the doctrines of Hinduism, for example, but its complicated myths and teachings are neither granitically hard nor formulaically exact. Still, Barnes does say: "I should warn you (especially if you are a philosopher, theologian, or biologist) that some of this book will strike you as amateur, do-it-yourself stuff." He means it to be that, just as he intends its joshing style. "Bastard!" he exclaims ironically at a friend who outdoes him in his fear of death. The tone is of an Amis père pub conversation. In discussing the Anglo-Saxon image of life as a bird passing through the hall, he remarks, "Any right-thinking bird flying into a warm banqueting hall would perch on the rafters as long as it bloody well could." Being talked at by Barnes for long in this register of speech can be tiring. No one wants him to test his fears by falling off his own perch, and he is not blind to the absurdities of some atheist deathbeds (Somerset Maugham summoning A.J. Ayer to assure him there is no survival after death). But his main perspective, through the experiences of nineteenth-century French anticlericals, disappointingly limits his depth of field.  |
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