Nothing to Be Frightened Of

Julian Barnes is the man I most would like to do lunch with!! Everything he writes is a sardonic conversation between our most cherished delusions and our true nature, whether he is musing on God,as in this book, or fictionalizing what has replaced God in his many novels.There is a kind of innate modesty in his writing that makes his words irresistible.

The truth is, I did not like this book except where it permitted me to escape its main topic. I am not an embracer of death, nor is Barnes, who hates and fears it, as I do. But he wrote a whole book about it. Are his death obsessions rooted in vanity or cowardice or, golly, mortality? Barnes admits to waking up in the dead of night yelling, "No No NO!" as he dreams of being swallowed up into blackness. And death weaves its way into his entire opus of novels because Barnes has always been obsessed with its ultimate appearance for every living thing.

Who can really accept death? Barnes gives us lots of small talk about the topic from such giants as Flaubert, Stendahl, Stravinsky, and Phillip Larkin, all of whom faced that moment in various states of terror. These are the good parts of his ramblings. In fact, when he's off topic, which is rarely, that's when this book is bearable. But I must say, 240 pages of musings, twistings, and turnings from Barnes on the ultimate moment are enough to depress the hell out of anybody, as there is no escape, not even blind, idiotic acceptance, which perhaps a handful of people have achieved. And even though Barnes poo poos the notion of being a father and passing on the genes as being a mild antidote to our shared mortal dilemma, I wonder how his life would have changed had he been one. Not all the moments he's spent dwelling on death, and death dwelling on him, would even have been available to him, as he'd have been changing nappies and going to parent-teacher meetings instead.

I've always admired Barnes, and this book of unpleasant musings only adds to that admiration. As you might tell, I have mixed feelings toward this book and its grisly theme. Hah! What does it really matter what feelings I have toward death, which also holds true for Mr. Barnes. No spiritual transfigurations here. No comforts, not even that of "artistic immortality." In fact, Barnes does not claim that he writes to overcome death. He writes because he writes, as plumbers plumb and butchers butcher. It's his job. It's what he does.

This book has been reviewed in The New York Review of Books by Frank Kermode and in the New York Times book review section, front page, by Garrison Keillor. They found it meritorious. I found it annoying, like a poisonous growth on my lower lip. So why 4 stars? Because poisonous growths are embedded in true art, and Barnes fully understands that. Besides, just about anything Barnes has to say is worth hearing, even if it's poured into your ear like deadly bile.

The nothing of which Mr. Barnes is frightened is death, I found out after selecting the book based on the title and the author's photograph on the cover--a tightly framed head shot of a middle-aged man looking directly into the camera with his head slightly turned to the side, with a a faint smile that might signify cool cynicism, a private joke, or a knowing wisdom. I had never read anything by the author before, but found this essay on death deep, readable, and witty, even when I disagreed with him.

Barnes, it turns out, is a British writer (so his wit is by turns subtle, ironic, and scathing) who is an agnostic obsessed with death--as a philosophical subject, of his parents, of famous writers, and more personally, his own. He is often awakened by dreams of death, and faces his fears from the standpoint of a humanist evolutionist unable to believe, but yet, professes that "I don't believe in God, but I miss Him," a profession his atheist philosopher brother finds "soppy."

Despite it all, Barnes still approaches the subject with good humor and consideration that he might be ("hopes to be" would be overstating the case) wrong. Quoting Isaac Bashevis Singer on immortality, "If survival has been arranged, you will have no choice in the matter.", Barnes turns to the camera with that wry smile and ripostes "The fury of the resurrected atheist: that would be something worth seeing." (p. 65)

I don't agree with Mr. Barnes, approaching the subject as a believer, a Christian secure in the belief that the Bible describes first the certainty of eternal life after death, and then the path to enjoying that eternal life in the presence of God. I say this not in an attempt to proselytize, antagonize, or criticize agnostics like Barnes or atheists less friendly to my spiritual belief, but merely to preface my awareness that accepting God's existence and salvation is essentially a closed system; one either believes in God, the Bible, and the plan of salvation, and are thus convinced of immortality, or one does not, in which case all bets are off and one is left to approach death either in abject fear, resolute denial, or as Barnes has done, with insightful examination of the complete bundle of human emotions the subject arouses.

I do wish that I could do a better job through the quiet testimony of my life in revealing the existence and presence of God and the ability to face death with certainty; instead, as Barnes says "My agnostic and atheistic friends are indistinguishable from my professedly religious ones in honesty, generosity, integrity and fidelity--or their opposites." (p. 117) That is a sad commentary that my spiritual maturity and that of the Christian community is not what it should be.

In any case, any reader whether Christian, agnostic, or atheist who approaches Barnes with an open mind will find plenty to ponder and enjoy here.

"In the midst of life we are in death." Julian Barnes has discarded God and religion, albeit admitting that he misses the certainty that religious faith offers. That makes his thoughts on mortality and death particularly intriguing, especially for others who share his lack of religious conviction or who grapple with questions. Death is the central and inevitable fact of our lives; our fear of confronting it means that works like Barnes's are all-too-rare.

In the hands of a lesser writer, this could have become a tedious and self-indulgent exercise. But Barnes blends memoir, literary reflections and personal philosophy to produce a series of extended essays that should prod the most reluctant baby boomer to re-examine their lives. Ultimately, the value of this eloquent book lies not only in Barnes's own insights about death and life, but in the way that it spurs readers to define for themselves what makes a well-lived life.

Should be mandatory reading for everyoone over the age of 40. And now I'm going back to read some other Barnes, after rediscovery the delights of his prose style and agile intellect.

Julian Barnes in NOTHING TO BE FRIGHTENED OF has written a thoughtful, sometimes humorous treatise on death that begins with the lines: "I don't believe in God, but I miss him." He contrasts his views-- an atheist at twenty but now an agnostic at sixty-two-- with those of his philosopher brother, who remains an atheist. His story meanders-- or in his words it "lollops"-- in the way we expect from a novelist; and I am sure it is far more interesting, at least for me, than a more logical one that his professor brother would have written.

Mr. Barnes attempts to be brutally honest about both himself and his family although he is quick to admit the unreliability of memory and quotes many events from his family's past where he and his only brother have totally different recollections about the same event. His parents, at least as he remembers them, are an interesting pair. "I'm sure my father feared death, and fairly certain my mother didn't: she feared incapacity and dependence more." Barnes regrets that he father never told him he loved him although he is pretty certain that he did. He reserves his harshest criticism, however, for his mother. She would prefer deafness to blindness, were she given a choice, because she wanted to be able to do her nails. After the death of his father, Barnes, though attentive to his mother, would never spend the night with her. "I couldn't face the physical manifestations of boredom, the sense of my vital spirits being drained away by her relentless solipsism, and the feeling that time was being sucked from my life, time that I would never get back, before or after death."

Barnes, rather than quoting the clergy and medical community, for the most part quotes from many of his favorite writers and other artists on death: Shostakovich, Ravel, Zola, Flaubert, Somerset Maugham, Jules Renard, even William Faulkner who said that a writer's obituary should simply read "He wrote books, then he died."

Some of Mr. Barnes' observations and conclusions: We escape our parents only to become them. Religion makes people behave no better or worse. He fears both death and what it takes to get there, the loss of memory ("memory is identity") and the loss of bodily functions. He is fairly certain that he will die in hospital and alone. The fear of death, at least for Barnes, doesn't "drop off" after the age of sixty as one friend of his believes. Finally he concludes that as a youth he was sure that art survived the temporal. He now reminds us that "Even the greatest art's triumph over death is risibly temporary. A novelist might hope for another generation of readers--two or three if lucky-- which may feel like a scorning of death, but it's really just scratching on the wall of the condemned cell. We do it to say: I was here too."

When Barnes asks a Catholic friend of his with whom he has lunch on his [Barnes'] sixtieth birthday why he is a believer he responds he wants to believe. I was reminded of Reynolds Price's many books on religion in which is asserts that he has had at least two actual physical visits from Jesus and am fairly certain what Barnes would conclude about that. He is quick to say that the God he misses is not the fundamentalist God of the United States and goes into a rant of how much he dislikes the narcissism of New Yorkers. I was all ready to be up in arms like the man who can complain about his wife but no one else can until Mr. Barnes has difficulty with "such fantasies as The Rapture" and America's obsession with Cabbage Patch dolls. It is difficult to find fault with those observations.

You may find that this book brings out the melancholia in you. Mr. Barnes, however, would probably-- quoting Richard Dawkins who said that the universe does not owe us consolation-- invite us to make the best of the short time we have on this planet and get on with it.