The second third of the book is the narrator’s disquisition, nearly fifty pages long, on Julian the Apostate, a figure whom he discovers from Elizabeth Finch’s notebooks to have been very important to her before her death, and whom he writes about in honor of her memory.Īmong Finch’s notes are her thoughts for a public lecture: She leaves the narrator her books and papers. The first is a narrative of the author’s relationship to his teacher, which continues with regular but infrequent meetings for lunch after he has left her class, until her death. While Brookner wrote many successful novels, Elizabeth Finch has published, in a manner reminiscent of Sherlock Holmes, only two out-of-print monographs.Īs was Gaul, the novel is divided into three parts.

But Barnes is too adept a writer to have his character mirror exactly the biography of his model. Nevertheless, we shall engage in dialogue.” I am not sure that the author wished her to come across as preening and self-congratulatory, but that is what she sounds like to me.Įlizabeth Finch is clearly modeled in part on Anita Brookner, the late art historian and novelist whose subject was the difficulty that the intellectual middle-class women of her age had in forming satisfactory relationships. In her opening address to her students, as recalled by the narrator, she says, “I am no Socrates and you are not a classroom of Platos, if that is the correct plural form. Like many such a person, she is, at heart, sure of everything. And Elizabeth Finch seems to me a sphynx without a riddle, though she is also mildly irritating, with her self-assurance masquerading as an openminded and somewhat disabused skepticism. An author can decree that his character should be tall, hunchbacked, sallow-skinned, or whatever, but he cannot decree him or her to be fascinating.

His teacher, Elizabeth Finch, was a woman whom the narrator (and author) wants us to find mysterious, admirable, and fascinating but, as many an author has found, it is harder to make a good character fascinating than a bad one. The narrator of his latest novel is a middle-class man of indeterminate profession and limited success who has had a complex personal life and who, in his thirties, now thirty years ago, pursued an adult-education course, presumably because he felt undereducated. His sentences are beautifully crafted, though I sometimes suspect that the parts of his books are greater than their wholes. He is a fastidious writer whose prose is always a pleasure to read. Julian Barnes is the most famous contemporary English novelist-in France, where he is enormously admired.

Julian barnes elizabeth finch reviews