J
ulian Barnes is a month out.
There has been an innocent mix-
up with our interview and I am
waiting in a pub near his north
London home while he is out for
a walk and expecting to see me a
month later. Even worse, I can’t let him
know. Barnes doesn’t carry a mobile
phone — although this does neatly
explain how the 76-year-old has written
14 novels, three short-story collections,
four detective novels and eight non-
fiction books, and you and I haven’t.
We eventually meet the next day, but
that missed connection feels appropri-
ate for a writer whose work is often
marked by loss, wistfulness and the
cruel nature of chance. Barnes began
writing fiction in the 1970s, in between
standing mutely at New Statesman edito-
rial meetings while his contemporaries
Martin Amis and Christopher Hitchens
confidently held forth. His latest novel is
a slim, puzzling, philosophical volume
named Elizabeth Finch after its lead
character, a night-school teacher. When
she dies one of her former students
trawls through her notebooks, looking
for clues to her life.
The middle third of the book, how-
ever, is given over to a (non-fiction)
account of the life and legacy of Julian
the Apostate, the last pagan Roman
emperor. Since his death in AD363,
Julian — and the pivot he represents,
when many gods were exchanged for
one — has haunted European intellectu-
als. Voltaire wrote about him, as did
Milton, and the clash between pagan-
ism and Christianity inspired Henrik
Ibsen’s play Emperor and Galilean (a
rarely performed work, now best
known for the extraordinarily low-slung
trousers Andrew Scott wore at the
National Theatre’s revival in 2011.) Julian
the Author, it turns out, knows a lot
about Julian the Apostate.
What links the book’s two seemingly
disparate subjects is Finch’s playful
argument that Europe’s conversion to
Christianity was, on balance, a mistake:
“the moment history went wrong”.
(Think about it: no Spanish Inquisition,
no witch burnings, no Mrs Brown’s Boys
Christmas special.) When she makes
her case in a public lecture, a tabloid
paper turns it into a screaming head-
line: CRAZY LADY PROF CLAIMS
ROMAN EMPEROR RUINED OUR SEX
LIFE. In the book the incident is known
as “The Shaming”.
Barnes isn’t afraid of being cancelled
— more on that later — and so he freely
confesses to sharing Elizabeth Finch’s
view. Religions that worship only one
god “are very dangerous and very
distorting”, he says. “They involve
continual policing of heretics.” The
Greeks and Romans adopted a more“pick and mix” attitude as they encoun-
tered new deities on their travels.
Talking to Barnes is often like taking
a rollercoaster through his mental refer-
ence library, from Penelope Fitzgerald
(“my favourite postwar writer”) to his
bedtime reading (a three-volume autobi-
ography of the Soviet author Konstantin
Paustovsky) via Accidental Gods, a non-
fiction book about men acclaimed as
divine. “You can’t not read Anna
Karenina,” he tells me, before amending
his statement — when I point out this is
eminently possible — to say: “You can’t
die not having read Anna Karenina.”
This unabashed intellectualism, and
the faint British disdain for it, hasBOOKS
‘THIS BOOK IS
PROBABLY
OFFENSIVE
TO MOST
CHRISTIANS
IN THE WORLD’
Julian Barnes isn’t afraid of cancel culture. In his
new novel about the last pagan Roman emperor, the
writer argues Europe’s conversion to Christianity was
a mistake — and exposes the horror of public shaming
haunted Barnes’s career. He once told an
interviewer that he hoped to reach an
age where he was described as “wise”
rather than “clever”.
Spend ten minutes with anyone in
publishing and the talk will turn to
“cancel culture” — whether it’s real or a
moral panic, and whether the climate
is more censorious or merely censori-
ous about different things. Barnes’s
long career has left him well placed to
observe changing tastes and shifting
taboos. Which of his books has pro-
voked the biggest backlash? He says that
Metroland, his first novel, was banned
in apartheid South Africa, which made
him very proud. “I thought, ‘This is ter-
rific. I probably would only have sold
100 copies, but now I have the badge.’”
With Elizabeth Finch he confronts
the consequences of ostracism directly.
Finch’s shaming carries echoes of the
two-minute hate against Hilary Mantel
after she dared to give a lecture describ-
ing the public image of the Duchess of
Cambridge as “a shop-window manne-
quin, with no personality of her own,entirely defined by what she wore”.
The Daily Mail’s front page pointedly
carried pictures of both women, a
detail Barnes used for his fictional
shaming. “It was more or less: who
would you fancy, then?” he says. “And
so I borrowed that.” But his creation,
like Mantel, refuses to be shamed —
Elizabeth simply retreats into herself,
never complaining, never explaining.
Literary insiders have wondered if
Finch’s character was inspired by a
close friend of his, the novelist Anita
Brookner, another resolutely unmarried
polymath. There is something old-
fashioned about Finch’s refusal to pick
over her wounds — as well as, it has to be
said, something old-fashioned about
the idea of tabloid newspapers as theHELEN LEWIS
INTERVIEW
I thought getting sued
by the Pope would be
a good oneBarnes on libel
I’m not a Remoaner,
I’m a ReturnerBarnes on politics
4 3 April 2022