Endgames – at one point Barnes declares that Departure(s) will be his final book

Barnes started to talk about a playful metafictional disquisition on biography, criticism, history, memoir, pedantry and passion that would become his third novel. But “after about 30 seconds of fervently explaining Flaubert’s Parrot to Kingsley, out of the corner of my eye I caught him with a look which meant ‘If you’d only hand me a machete I’d have this man’s head off in an instant’”. Well, Amis père has been dead these 30 years, but it seems fair to say that were he still with us, he’d have been similarly exophthalmic over what might be Barnes’ fifteenth novel.

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