Slim and stark ... Barnes’s prose is largely stripped bare — it resembles a tall ship that, in the face of a storm, has taken down and stored its sails and rigging to better endure punishment.
Departure(s) brims with wisdom reluctantly acquired. Barnes’s powers of observation and comment may have diminished, but his appetite for playfulness and detail, for bedrock human stuff, remains unslakable ... As a culture, we’ve grown cynical at the notion that we are witnessing the 'last' of anything — the last tour, the last film and the last episode so rarely are. Still, here’s hoping that Barnes is not yet finished writing.
The whole package is a culmination of sorts, shimmering with his silky, erudite prose; beneath the suave surface is an earnest investigation into the mysterious ways of the human heart ... Absence itself—absence of love, absence of the beloved—becomes a crucial locus of meaning.
Even if Departure(s) does not turn out to be Barnes' capstone, it is a welcome addition to his bibliography ... Slim but weighty, digressive yet incisive.
He fills the first 23 pages of Departure(s) with a rambling meditation on the nature of memory, specifically involuntary autobiographical memories, sudden recollections that come upon one unbidden ... None of this is terribly riveting. The narrative improves only when Barnes gets out of his own head ... Barnes can be too clever by half, and Departure(s) suffers for it. And yet, in the final chapter, he returns to the theme of memory, now skillfully weaving in thoughts on love, on aging, on writing fiction, on preparing for death. It’s a virtuoso performance, a fitting flourish if this book does indeed turn out to be his last, and it makes for stimulating reading. But don’t be fooled. Departure(s) is a novel only to the degree that it fits Barnes’s own description of a novelist’s job: 'To entertain, to reveal truth, to move, to provoke reverie.'
The writing is cerebral, but companionably so. A key to Mr. Barnes’s books is that in style as well as form he is a hybridizer, able to combine seemingly contrary temperaments into a single writing voice. He is the most punctilious of authors—orderly, factual, reasonable and contained. He is interested in the world and he loves digesting information in clear and presentable ways ... But there is also an unshackled side to Mr. Barnes, which we might reductively call his European half, since most of his intellectual lodestars are French—Flaubert in particular, though Marcel Proust has a greater presence in Departure(s). ... In its poignant conclusion, Julian—or is it Mr. Barnes?—thanks his readers and bids us a stirring farewell. It’s tidily done, very organized, very proper. Still, I wonder if this really will be Mr. Barnes’s last book. Wouldn’t it be like this subtly sly author if the announcement turned out to be a narrative conceit—one last artful trick to cheat the end from arriving?
The final part of Departure(s), in which Barnes examines the struggle to find happiness and accept life’s ending, is unexpectedly funny ... The intermingling of non-fiction and fiction could have been confusing, but Barnes really does know exactly what he is up to and his control of the narrative makes it enthralling and affecting ... Brief but it is not slight and, each time I read it, I thought about it for days afterwards.
Departure(s) is far from his best book — he wrote better about death in Nothing to be Frightened of (2008) and Levels of Life (2013) — but it is completely sui generis.
Departure(s) is a novel, but not only a novel; its fictional characters may in fact be real people, according to whether or not we believe Barnes, and there is a significant portion of autobiography, which he dares us to disbelieve ('google that if you wish') ... Whether he’s writing fiction or nonfiction, Barnes is excellent, and always has been, at this kind of Pooterish persona. In the 'straight' life-writing of Departure(s), he manages to impose a bathetic humour on his diagnosis with incurable but manageable blood cancer, which happened at the beginning of lockdown ... Why is he laying down his pen now? Not because his life is in immediate danger; as he tells us, he is as likely to be got by something else as by his 'manageable' condition. Maybe a little because, like the novelist Brian Moore, he doesn’t want to die in the middle of writing a book ... At the very end of the book, he tells us that he will miss us, his readers. There’s no way to reciprocate without sounding mawkish, but there it is.
The habit of self-correction is among the defining characteristics of this book, which is at once confidently authoritative and tentatively questioning. Barnes assumes a personal relation with his readers, built on the kind of intimacy that cancer’s company doesn’t provide. His voice is informal, confiding, sometimes playful ... Don’t expect too much ... Cool and analytical detachment – that has always been his style. But it is not altogether true that he does not tell us how to live. His vigilant attention to the world demands an answering thoughtfulness from his readers, and that is a way to live.
The fictional Julian Barnes of Departure(s) may or may not be telling us the truth about this being his final book. However, if it is his last, what a thoughtful and dynamic novel he’s chosen to say goodbye with. Let’s read this one — and secretly hope for more.
After reading Julian Barnes’ latest novel, Departure(s), I feel I know what a conversation with the author would be like: witty, literary, deeply intelligent, and wildly rambling.
Despite its romantic veneer, Departure(s) is far more about life than love ... Departure(s)’s meandering digressions sometimes become self-indulgent ... We should mourn the end of a career and the diminishment of a generation of writers ... I, for one, will continue tending to my regrets, which now include Barnes no longer writing.
If this proves to be the real Barnes’s final work, it will be a fitting coda, but the novella’s acuity and cleverness will have readers hoping that this particular aspect of the plot is fictional ... Barnes remains in top form.
