PositiveIrish Times (IRE)A strange, elusive novel ... Life beyond the lecture hall is literally non-existent: this is emphatically not a campus novel ... Instead what we get – first in her lectures, later from her notebooks – are EF’s ideas ... These thoughts are certainly not without interest, but it’s hard to know what to do with them. As we never step outside the classroom, we never see her lessons drive any change, even in the narrator’s own life ... One can’t help wondering if this insistence on EF’s specialness, which comes to seem relentless, stems from the author’s anxiety about his project. If we don’t believe that EF is special, why should we want to read an anthology of her thoughts? Things get stranger, considerably, in the second part ... [An] essay is presented in full: 60 pages (one-third of the novel) about the life of the fourth-century emperor, and what might have been had he not been killed by a stray spear in Persia. This comes as something of a left turn, to be sure. Nevertheless, it’s tremendously entertaining, as well as a brilliant embodying of the novel’s theme ... Barnes has always enjoyed testing the boundary between fact and fiction, and here he pushes it to the limit. In the final part, however, Neil accepts that no matter how much he learns he will never fully understand EF, any more than he does Julian; that a human life is not something that can be understood. This acceptance brings some of the warmest moments in the book, and, as Barnes the chronicler of ideas steps aside, and Barnes the novelist takes over, a series of haunting images.
