And somewhere along the way, he is going to tell you a lie. Whichever it is, the man - fastidious in manner and an incurable gossip - will linger on each reflection or artifact, until the obsession reaches its natural, anticlimactic ending. The obsession might be a memory, an object, or a person, but it will be enigmatic. See, the thing is, the man has become an obsessive of some kind. He is safe, even - safe enough at least to seem like a reliable narrator.īut as he will come to explain, the story he is telling is not about him, not really. The man is, for the most part, commonplace. If he has been married, the marriage is described by its ending and not a lot else. If he has children, they are counted and sometimes named. In the retelling of his own life, he is reticent: the details of his situation are offered to us like pulled teeth. He is privately educated, well spoken, and unassuming. The man is British, naturally, with a careful name like Christopher or Paul, though he often dabbles in Francophilia. Elizabeth Finch “celebrates the cast of mind” – subtle, sceptical and ironic – that “Barnes most prizes”.A MAN, comfortable in both wealth and middle age, is living alone. As a teacher, Finch “blazes with vividness”, and Neil’s essay is a “bravura exercise in nimbly handled erudition”. I disagree, said Peter Kemp in The Sunday Times. It all adds up to a “work stubbornly determined to deny us its pleasures”. The novel is further let down by its baffling middle section, which consists of Neil’s “stolid student essay” on the fourth century Roman emperor Julian the Apostate, whom Finch regarded as a kindred spirit, said Sam Byers in The Guardian. It’s the only thing that matters,” a classmate of Neil recalls. Despite Neil’s insistence on Finch’s originality, “what she actually says tends to fall flat”.

“Part of the challenge of rendering a brilliantly inspirational teacher is making them sufficiently brilliant and inspirational,” said Sameer Rahim in The Daily Telegraph. Very much a “thinky” novel, Elizabeth Finch may be “rather less fun” than most of Barnes’s books, but it “offers plenty to chew on”. Neil recalls their sort-of friendship – they occasionally met for lunch – and describes his quest, in the present day, to find out more about Finch in the wake of her death. A Previous Life: a fairly preposterous new novelįinch, who is “probably inspired” by Barnes’s friend, the late novelist Anita Brookner, is remembered as an inspirational teacher, someone “who obliged us – simply by example – to seek and find within ourselves a centre of seriousness”.Novel of the week: The Candy House by Jennifer Egan.

Julian barnes elizabeth finch reviews