For the first two-thirds of Julian Barnes' latest book, the reader would be forgiven for thinking he or she was immersed in a strange but perfectly crafted history of — of all things — 19th-century Anglo-French ballooning. But then, after taking us high into the clouds, Barnes abruptly descends for the last third and confronts the subject of his own crash landing: the death of his wife … Love and grief, then, are the two motifs. Barnes can explain the former (‘the meeting point of truth and magic’) but the latter leaves him stumped — offering only, yet succinctly, that ‘Grief is the negative image of love.’ If, at the end, Barnes is still unable to make sense of his loss, he has at least edged a little closer to accepting it.
Kavanagh doesn’t appear until the last of the three essays. She casts a shadow over the playful and digressive preliminary chapters, and in this new, lower light they seem a defense against grief’s identity-warping madness — as if Barnes worried that writing about the death of the beloved might kill her all over again, this time in prose. The third essay, bracingly precise, is the emotional center of the book … The first two essays, intellectually and imaginatively rigorous, provide a kind of apology for the third. But despite all expectations, those two are the ones that occasionally wax sentimental; the dialogue between Burnaby and Bernhardt can blush somewhat purple...His articulation of his anguish is well served by his leeriness, as the book’s last section is one of the least indulgent accounts of mourning I have ever read. I almost wish Levels of Life consisted only of its 56 shattering pages.
Burnaby died in 1885, in a battle in Sudan, from a spear-thrust through the neck. Barnes felt he had suffered a similar spear-thrust, or balloon crash, when his wife of 30 years died just 37 days after being diagnosed with a brain tumour. Where the first two sections portray life in the air and on the ground, the searing 50-page essay that concludes the book describes descent – no upper air, no perspective, just darkness and despair … One grief throws no light upon another, he says, quoting EM Forster. But some aspects of grief are universal, or can be made so through the honesty and precision with which they are articulated.
The tricky synthesis Barnes is after doesn't quite come off. We read the opening nonfiction section, ‘The Sin of Height,’ and the quasi-fictional ‘On the Level,’ intrigued but somewhat baffled by his fascination with 19th century aeronautics and weighted down by his belabored extended metaphors of soaring and crashing … Yet Levels of Life takes flight with its third, autobiographical section, ‘The Loss of Depth.’ After a vigil that lasted just ‘thirty-seven days from diagnosis to death,’ Barnes crash-landed into widowerhood. Normally so crisp and circumspect, Barnes writes movingly.
Julian Barnes’s Levels of Life is a strange book about loving someone and losing them. Barnes’s wife, Pat, to whom the book is dedicated, died in 2008. A photo of her, embracing Barnes, appears as the author photo on the back flap. But the first two sections of this short book have little to do with Barnes — they are a whimsical history of ballooning, and a related story about the romance between Sarah Bernhardt and Fred Burnaby, a soldier who crossed the English Channel in a hot-air balloon in 1882 … Though there can be no greater meaning for his loss (as he puts it, ‘What is ‘success’ in mourning?’), Barnes succeeds in transmitting to those lucky readers who have never lost someone, this experience of grief as one among many ‘levels of life,’ utterly subject to change, without reason, at any moment.
What is more remarkable, Julian Barnes asks in his brief but deeply stirring new memoir, Levels of Life, the vessel born aloft by gas or heated air or the shadow it leaves on the landscape? Both are potential metaphors for this book’s focus, which is grief … There is a great dignity in how little Barnes reveals about his own life in Levels of Life, and how late it becomes a study of grief — about two-thirds through this slim book in the third and final section. He does not, ever, use his wife’s name. Still, the metaphoric intensity of what has come before gives Barnes’s account of his grief a fierce and fiery kind of momentum. Within a few pages it is aloft.
British novelist Barnes offers a delicately oblique, emotionally tricky geography of grief, which he has constructed from his experience since the sudden death in 2008 of his beloved wife of 30 years, literary agent Pat Kavanagh. The ‘levels’ of the title—a high, even, and deep ‘moral space’—play out in the juxtaposition of two subjects that are seemingly incongruous but potentially marvelous and sublime together, as Barnes delineates through his requisite and always fascinating historical examples … In his grieving turmoil, he questions assumptions about death and mourning, loss and memory, and he grapples eloquently with the ultimate moral conundrum: how to live?
Just as it took five years for Barnes to address his wife’s death in print, it takes two sections of establishing tone and perspective before he writes of his mourning directly, though of course, he has been writing about it from the start of the book. ‘I mourn her uncomplicatedly, and absolutely,’ he writes. Ultimately, he finds some resonance in opera, which had never interested him before, as he discovers that ‘song was a more primal means of communication than the spoken word—both higher and deeper.’ The perspectives of height and depth tie the first two sections to the third, where love and death can’t ever be resolved but rather, somehow survived. Barnes’ reticence is as eloquent as it is soul-shuddering.
