This uncompromising novel denies its readers many of the pleasures of fiction. More concerned with the ambiguity of ideas than with clarity of plot or character, it is a heartfelt celebration of the life of the mind – though its defiance is qualified by the wryness we would expect from Julian Barnes ... The story of Neil’s life – his only story – turns on his experience of a year-long course for mature students on 'Culture and Civilization' that he once took, and its enduring legacy through years of reflection. But, as Neil often tells us, 'this is not my story'. It is the story of Elizabeth Finch, the enigmatic woman who delivered the course ... A third character, embedded in the ambiguities of textual record and legend, becomes prominent in the narrative: Julian the Apostate, the philosophical Roman emperor ... His elusive example, intertwined with the lives of Neil and his fellow students, leads the reader from a personal narrative to the broader framework of history ... Several features of this novel are located in recognizably Barnesian territory. The story turns on a long relationship, which changes through the decades; it focuses on moments of evocative return ... Yet it would be a mistake to think that Barnes is simply repeating old tricks in Elizabeth Finch. Alongside the characteristically self-deprecating tone of Neil’s hesitant ruminations stands something more steely. The novel is in part a fierce defence of the intellectual values that have directed the course of Barnes’s writing from the first ... A book that is, among its many layered identities, a manifesto ... This is a novel that rejects the rigid convictions of cultural polemics while constructing a qualified but resolute polemic of its own.
Barnes’s new novel Elizabeth Finch—though novel seems a curious category for what is essentially a thoughtful essay lightly draped in novelistic garments—raises perennial questions by reflecting on the life and legacy of Julian the Apostate ... A certain Mozartian lightness has been replaced by stolid earnestness. The novel’s title seems in part a nod to J. M. Coetzee’s Elizabeth Costello, a similarly essayistic novel, and while less dry than the work of Coetzee (whose great gifts do not include a sense of humor), the book is less engaging than, well, much of Julian Barnes ... Ultimately, this is perhaps an exploration of the very notion of legacy, of what lives on after a person’s death, of the slippery and mutable details that might shape their memory ... It is certainly wise. One might wish only that Barnes had chosen a rather livelier and more compelling protagonist than stolid Neil alongside whom to journey toward this illuminating truth.
... characteristically cerebral ... Longtime fans won't be surprised to learn that the English author's Elizabeth Finch is erudite yet accessible ... Now in his mid-70s, Barnes is an elder statemen of English letters, a winner of all the major literary prizes his country can offer. If the wit of his early novels is seldom seen these days, he's no less observant, no less dogged in his pursuit of intellectual clarity. He'll keep after an idea until he — and his readers — gets it. In this way, he's a lot like the lead character of this elegant novel.
EF promises that her course will be 'rigorous fun', a phrase, by no coincidence, tailor-made for Barnes’s books, but this one is more rigorous and rather less fun than most. The plot, such as it is, involves Neil trying to find out more about EF’s life after her death (we are, after all, looking back) by poring over her papers and asking nosey questions of her family ... Elizabeth Finch may be harder going than most of Barnes’s books, but it offers plenty to chew on; it’s that old-fashioned thing, a novel of ideas, and not so much a talky book as a thinky one, with barely a sentence in it that doesn’t have some nutritional value ... One asks, ‘Is it interesting?’ Elizabeth Finch certainly passes that test. I’ll remember EF when most other characters I’ve met this year have faded.
[A] slim, peculiar novel ... It is not always possible to observe the fascination of others and be fascinated oneself; that is the chief difficulty of Elizabeth Finch ... It is challenging to find her as compelling as her students seem to ... As I turned the pages, I kept asking myself: what is this novel for? Where is its heart? What is Barnes trying to get at? ... The reader is led — as is often the case in Barnes’s elegant work — to question what appears on the surface ... So the message is . . . be suspicious both of first impressions and easy conclusions? This is hardly a startling insight ... These incidents, and the book’s attempted investigation of a hinge point in human history and culture make it possible to suppose, at first, that Barnes is taking aim at the torrents of righteous indignation which can appear to torment us from every side. Think twice before you come down too hard on one side or another, is the bland message driven home.
Sections of a 2016 obituary tribute Barnes paid to his friend, the 'witty, glitteringly intelligent, reserved' art historian and novelist Anita Brookner, reappear, sometimes word for word, in Neil’s recollections of his relationship with EF ... The narrative fitted around the central ideas in this book, a fictional focus on philosophy, is minimal ... The book’s central and most enthralling section, this deals with a figure EF esteemed as a kindred spirit ... A connoisseur and master of irony himself, he fills this book with instances of its exhilarating power.
This is a work that both uses and abuses ambiguity. In doing so, it undermines itself ... There’s a sense of daring in depicting the impact of an inspirational teacher. If Finch and her teaching fall short, our faith in the novel will falter. Early on, we sense Barnes’s hesitancy. Straining to burnish Finch’s aura, he deploys, then redeploys, a reliable novelistic cliche – charisma through immobility ... This is ambiguity not as subtlety, but avoidance: Finch simply isn’t there. Hoping to make a virtue of her absence, Barnes lays down a fog of negation. But this only deepens the problem. The reader feels distanced from Finch; the novel feels distanced from its subject ... Finch’s studiously bien-pensant truisms, coupled with Barnes’s via negativa characterisation, leave the novel in search of a centre ... Barnes is in his element here – investigating with subtlety and gentleness the quiet mysteries that make up a life. So it’s all the more mystifying and disappointing that, just as the novel Elizabeth Finch could have been moves tantalisingly into view, Barnes self-sabotages, devoting the book’s entire middle section to Neil’s stolid student essay on Julian the Apostate ... Each new section must compensate for the shortcomings of the last. With a motionless middle on his hands, Barnes works in the final third to recover some sense of momentum ... Barnes has depended too heavily on ambiguity as a substitute for clarity. Consequently, Finch and her ideas lack force ... Coming as the conclusion to a novel that had begun on firmer ground, this loosening of certainty could have passed for daring subversion. Here, though, it feels like just another evasion – vagueness layered on to vagueness. Elizabeth Finch is a work stubbornly determined to deny us its pleasures, even as it hints at what they could have been.
... the same characteristics that have made Barnes a master novelist—trenchant insight, economic thoroughness, a surgeon’s poise, and the will to pan for gold in the rivers that connect the ordinary and the exceptional, the human and humanity—also lessen his capacity for surprise. The author of 16 or so works of fiction (depending on how you count), not to mention a handful of nonfiction books and translations, continues to work with the same grand themes: love, death, faith, loyalty, aging, and so forth. It amounts not so much to a flaw as it does to a limitation...Surely, he knows all this, which is why each successive book is more finely styled than the last. In his latest novel, Elizabeth Finch, Barnes’s style is sharper than ever, but the effect is diminished by the course along which he steers the narrative ... he elects for a mix of fiction and straight history that masquerades as plot ... the historical background on Julian the Apostate feels too drawn out, bogging down those crucial middle rounds in a long, lumbering clinch ... a comforting, if a bit slow, read, because it fits the lovely mold Barnes has tooled over the course of his career. It also unwittingly subscribes to its own point: trying to will a connection into existence doesn’t always achieve the desired outcome.
Unfortunately, there is something inert and less than effervescent about Elizabeth Finch ... Part of the problem is that Neil, as he's the first to admit, is a passive, rather uninteresting character. But a bigger problem is that, tucked into his encomium is his decades-overdue essay for the course he took as a floundering 30-year-old after the end of both his first marriage and his acting career ... Readers who have enjoyed the far-reaching fascinations that Barnes has woven into his other books may be unfazed by this novel's dive into Julian the Apostate and EF's controversial thesis regarding his role in civilization's supposed wrong turn toward monotheism. Neil's essay focuses on the changing attitudes toward Julian over the centuries, which, in a lovely image, he likens to 'walking across a stage pursued by different-colored spotlights.' But that wasn't enough to lighten the pedantry weighing down his novel ... Fortunately, the portrait of the title character is more engaging ... This less than inspiring revelation manages to further deflate Barnes' already flat novel.
Here is one of those reviews — all too common lately — in which I struggle to delay as long as possible the sad news that you should skip this novel...Such contortions feel especially awkward, given that the novelist, Julian Barnes, is one of the world’s finest English writers ... now comes Elizabeth Finch, whose magic involves making a short book feel like a long one. It isn’t so much a story as a late-night hagiography drunk on distilled irony. Indeed, the only motion through most of these pages is generated by Barnes aggressively winking at us ... Barnes captures the language of adoration with exquisite poise, the devoted student’s endless cycle of qualifications and special pleading ... when Neil inherits his teacher’s journals, well, you’ll want to catch up on your favorite podcasts ... Throughout this slavish accumulation of her too-clever aphorisms, her sweeping historical generalities and her arch cultural observations, Neil remains wholly devoted to polishing his devotion ... what nobody needs now is the 48-page student essay about Julian that sits at the center of Elizabeth Finch like a lump of undigested potato in the throat.
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.
Riddling to the point of reader-denying ... The novel confuses the reader’s sense of what is and isn’t significant with a steady drumbeat of caveats...that turn the narrative into a series of false starts ... As a reading experience, it’s akin to answering a cold call only to find yourself put on hold, which isn’t to say there aren’t funny moments ... Trouble is, the comedy inflicts collateral damage on our ability to gauge how reliable a guide Neil is to his overall subjectTrouble is, the comedy inflicts collateral damage on our ability to gauge how reliable a guide Neil is to his overall subject, not least because Elizabeth seldom seems the purveyor of 24-carat wisdom she’s made out to be ... Barnes couldn’t make it any clearer that he knows exactly what he’s doing; the question is, why is he doing it? ... Barnes is smart enough to know that readers faced with so astringent a novel may well find themselves forced to make their own fun.
Neil writes that Elizabeth Finch’s strengths are 'clarity, irony, wit, insight'. All Barnes’ strengths ... Elizabeth Finch is also, and most successfully, an exploration of love beyond romanticism. Falling in love with the charismatic teacher is sometimes part of the course. It’s an old story, always up for refurbishing ... Barnes’ interest in philosophy bullies him as a novelist. Much of this novel is philosophy. And, regrettably, pedantry, although my pedant might be your teacher. Some will respond with cries of recognition and/or pleasure. Not me. There are many pleasurable moments, but I read with a curious, even unflagging exasperation. Clarity, irony, wit, insight are valuable, but they need currency ... As I read Elizabeth Finch, a novel so emotionally restrained as to be unsoundable, old emotions surfaced: of pretending, as women did in those long ago years, to be interested in a boring boyfriend’s philosophical ideas.
The novel is bookended by two finely cut portraits of Elizabeth Finch ... The middle section of the novel is, suitably, an essay about Rome’s last pagan emperor Julian the Apostate, written to honour Neil’s late teacher. While this section’s theological musings might sound obtuse, Barnes via Neil coolly weaves the contradictions of the ancient world into the anxieties of our own. Reflections on stoicism and romanticism, monotheism and pluralism, chastity and the erotic are at play here. All the while Barnes makes a sly show of what fiction can do, taking the reader on a journey of big ideas and shaded feelings without ever being didactic: his irony and wit are sandpaper dry. There is even the odd schoolboy joke. Perceptive and tender, playful and paradoxical, Elizabeth Finch is so much more than the sum of its parts.
Are novels more frivolous than non-fiction? Not in Julian Barnes’s universe. His are as thought-provoking as any history or biography, and never more so than in this latest offering, which is as much a work of ethics and philosophy as of invention ... Barnes’s style is so compellingly undemonstrative – almost self-effacing – it would be easy to gulp it down without pausing to chew. Rarely, though, has he offered more to digest ... The novel takes the form of a partisan memoir, as Neil recalls her inspirational teaching, and tries to discover more about her ... The premise behind the novel is intriguing ... Split into three parts, the central portion of Elizabeth Finch is Neil’s essay on Julian. Leavened by his companionable voice, and drawing on progressively more favourable historical judgements, it is a lesson in time lending perspective. Not until the novel concludes, however, does its purpose become fully clear ... Sophisticated and subtle, it is also enthralling. Using Neil’s fellow students to offer fresh perspectives, the author holds various surprises and revelations in reserve to keep the plot’s gentle momentum going. By the book’s end, its obvious narrative artifice is outweighed by its probing profundity.
Poised, droll, epigrammatic ... We may not be wholly convinced of the vaunted originality of [EF's] ideas and elegance of her teaching ... For the first 70 pages Elizabeth Finch appears to be a twinkly character study, a portrait of the sort of noble teacher who inspires poetic and political awakenings. Like most of Barnes’s recent work, it exhibits the wryness of the late middle-aged. The prose has his customary wit and precision. But then it becomes something else ... It’s brave of Barnes to make the book’s middle third a dry student dissertation (with chatty asides) on the ups and downs of Julian’s reputation ... Barnes has an escapologist’s nimbleness, and Elizabeth Finch only toys with the possibility of being an anti-Brexit screed or an unblushing selfie. It’s more concerned with disappointment, hidden desires, mis-understandings and the irrecoverability of the past. Each is familiar territory for Barnes, yet here their treatment feels slight. At one point Neil accuses himself of ‘novelettish banality’, and the phrase lingers in the mind uncomfortably.
The blurb tells us 'this is more than a novel', a strange remark if only because it seems to devalue novel-writing ... The novel may, in a sense, be homage to Anita Brookner restored to life as Elizabeth Finch. It is characteristic of Barnes’s fairness that he has Neil include in his last chapter a letter from another of EF’s pupils on that course who though poorly of her and says she would never have got away with that sort of teaching today. Which is of course a nice commentary on our own shabby, scoundrel time.
Merging the ear for voice, language, and character Barnes displays in his fiction with the exhaustive research he conducts... this is a lyrical, thoughtful, and intriguing exploration of love, grief, and the collective myths of history. Barnes adds yet another remarkable title to his astoundingly remarkable body of work.
What this information is doing in the middle of a novel is quite another matter, but Mr. Barnes has always enjoyed playing with form and style, the porous border between fiction and nonfiction ... It is not hard to see why Julian is a good subject for metaphysically-inclined writers ... EF is a wonderful character, even if we only ever catch her glimpses ... The 'shaming' strand also doubles as a clever narrative device, piquing our interest and keeping us turning the pages ... Mr. Barnes is on less firm footing here. The Jewish thread feels slightly cheap, a symbol for EF’s hard-to-pin-down quality and a vehicle for a brief foray into identity politics. As for the other characters—they are well-sketched but no more than that ... This is a reflection of another, more central problem: that essay on Julian at the story’s heart. While sympathetic to the novel’s themes and logic, it is less helpful to its art, diverting us away from a nicely unfolding tale that subsequently struggles to reassert itself in the final third ... while this other Julian is well aware of his apostasy as a storyteller, and while many readers will appreciate his ambiguous, ideas-heavy approach to his craft, others will find themselves hungering for a little more of the simple stuff, like character and plot development; those humbler, less pluralistic satisfactions.
Tepid, talky ... [Neil] honors [Finch's] frequent references to Julian the Apostate by writing the essay on the emperor that forms the novel’s central section, which, via Barnes, is reliably intelligent and perceptive ... Neil, though, is less character than mouthpiece ... Finch’s appeal remains as mysterious as she does. Even devoted fans may be disappointed.