Pulse by Julian Barnes (Jonathan Cape, £16.99)
The black-and-white cover suggests the waver of heartbeats on a monitor, or the veins in marble—but closer inspection reveals its fine, wispy white lines to be those of tiny roots, searching for space and nutrients. Nothing could be more appropriate for Julian Barnes’s third book of short stories, which comes two years after his non-fiction meditation on death, Nothing To Be Frightened Of.
These are tales of love, death and cigarettes; of the pleasures of gossip and the revenges of art. It’s a strange and heady mixture, and for the most part predictably Barnesian. The apparently confessional, intimate conversations with the reader are back, together with the contemporary, middle-class milieu. The rich and intriguing humanism of Barnes’s most recent novel—2005’s Arthur & George—appears initially to be an aberration.
Unlike his contemporaries—Martin Amis, Ian McEwan, Salman Rushdie, William Boyd—Barnes invites intimacy while simultaneously repulsing it. Both his short and longer fiction suggest they are drawn from autobiographical truth, by someone devoted to his wife, an excellent cook, an aesthete and a Francophile. But then irony interposes—what he called, memorably, in Flaubert’s Parrot (1984), “the snorkel of sanity”—and we are forced to ask whether any of this is actually true. It’s a game that many modernist novelists, from Vladimir Nabokov to Paul Auster, amuse themselves playing, much to the detriment of the wider existential questions fiction can pose.
Pulse is never less than interesting, elegantly written and quirky. But all of its stories are overlaid with a consciousness of loss and mortality that becomes over-insistent. The collection begins and ends with stories of failed love affairs which amount to private tragedies. Though the first (“East Wind”) is in the third person and the last (“Pulse”) is in the first, the feel of each protagonist is similar; so, too, is “Trespass,” which comes almost halfway through.
The pattern goes like this: a respectable middle-class man picks up an attractive, inscrutable woman, enjoys sex with her and then loses her. He asks too many questions, is too much of a control freak, and she is too secretive or evasive or manipulative to put up with him. It’s a depressing pattern, explored with wit and sorrow; one is reminded of Philip Larkin’s joke that “deprivation is to me what daffodils were to Wordsworth.” When love is found in Barnesland, it’s always doomed, if not by sexual jealousy—as in Talking it Over (1991)—then by disease and death. If fidelity and happiness are possible, they happen to someone else, far away or in another time.
Having and raising children is the central life experience that Barnes’s protagonists, almost without exception, are cut off from. The parents who do bring up a child, in “Harmony,” are so neurotic that their sensitive, artistic daughter becomes blind; her musical gift is dependent on her remaining uncured. Four linked short stories entitled “At Phil and Joanna’s,” consisting almost entirely of dialogue over a dinner table, circulate airless, affected badinage about cancer, politics, cookery, global warming and sex. As art, they are closer to Frederic Raphael than Evelyn Waugh; as people, hell.
The short story as a form often focuses on imprisonment by mediocrity, yet the best also tend to show how the imagination enables people to transcend it. Here, the way we define ourselves through “essential taste,” caused by physical or temperamental deformity, lies at the heart of these stories—and the result is that almost all are pot-bound. The two most heart-rending are “Marriage Lines,” about a widower returning to the Scottish island where he and his wife had been happy together, and “Pulse,” in which a man describes his father’s tender, agonised care of his dying wife. Both have the adamantine hardness of observed truth concerning the human need in dying for “something with rules, laws, answers, and an overall solution; something fixable.” There is no way out: the human condition is terminal.
The best story in Pulse comes in the second half, which is stronger, more experimental and more purposeful. “The Limner” is historical, and concerns Wadsworth, a deaf-mute artist whose closest relationship is with his art, and his horse. Admirably self-sufficient, he keeps a note to proffer to people who try to condescend to him: “Sir, the understanding does not cease to function when the portals of the mind are blocked.” Such subtlety is beyond the pompous, provincial tax collector Tuttle, who commissions a portrait and then complains his depiction needs “more dignity.”
An all-seeing eye, Wadsworth observes that “he was the client’s master when his eye discerned what the client would prefer him not to know… When Wadsworth provided his clients with their portraits, it was habitually the first time they had seen themselves as someone else saw them. Sometimes, when the picture was presented, the limner would detect a sudden chill passing over his subject’s skin, as if he were thinking, so this is how I truly am. It was a moment of unaccountable seriousness: this image was how he would be remembered when he was dead.”
The story, though complete in itself, has an energy to its writing that is very different to the rest of the collection; it could be part of a new novel. The title story, by contrast, ends with the narrator’s father choosing not to vent his anger, but shaking an insensitive specialist by the hand. It ends with the narrator saying, “I imagine my father there, not getting angry, standing up, shaking hands, turning, leaving. I imagine it.”
Is that imagination going to be used to liberate, or to delineate further frustration? Only more work from Barnes in his richer, less aubiographical vein may answer this.
The black-and-white cover suggests the waver of heartbeats on a monitor, or the veins in marble—but closer inspection reveals its fine, wispy white lines to be those of tiny roots, searching for space and nutrients. Nothing could be more appropriate for Julian Barnes’s third book of short stories, which comes two years after his non-fiction meditation on death, Nothing To Be Frightened Of.
These are tales of love, death and cigarettes; of the pleasures of gossip and the revenges of art. It’s a strange and heady mixture, and for the most part predictably Barnesian. The apparently confessional, intimate conversations with the reader are back, together with the contemporary, middle-class milieu. The rich and intriguing humanism of Barnes’s most recent novel—2005’s Arthur & George—appears initially to be an aberration.
Unlike his contemporaries—Martin Amis, Ian McEwan, Salman Rushdie, William Boyd—Barnes invites intimacy while simultaneously repulsing it. Both his short and longer fiction suggest they are drawn from autobiographical truth, by someone devoted to his wife, an excellent cook, an aesthete and a Francophile. But then irony interposes—what he called, memorably, in Flaubert’s Parrot (1984), “the snorkel of sanity”—and we are forced to ask whether any of this is actually true. It’s a game that many modernist novelists, from Vladimir Nabokov to Paul Auster, amuse themselves playing, much to the detriment of the wider existential questions fiction can pose.
Pulse is never less than interesting, elegantly written and quirky. But all of its stories are overlaid with a consciousness of loss and mortality that becomes over-insistent. The collection begins and ends with stories of failed love affairs which amount to private tragedies. Though the first (“East Wind”) is in the third person and the last (“Pulse”) is in the first, the feel of each protagonist is similar; so, too, is “Trespass,” which comes almost halfway through.
The pattern goes like this: a respectable middle-class man picks up an attractive, inscrutable woman, enjoys sex with her and then loses her. He asks too many questions, is too much of a control freak, and she is too secretive or evasive or manipulative to put up with him. It’s a depressing pattern, explored with wit and sorrow; one is reminded of Philip Larkin’s joke that “deprivation is to me what daffodils were to Wordsworth.” When love is found in Barnesland, it’s always doomed, if not by sexual jealousy—as in Talking it Over (1991)—then by disease and death. If fidelity and happiness are possible, they happen to someone else, far away or in another time.
Having and raising children is the central life experience that Barnes’s protagonists, almost without exception, are cut off from. The parents who do bring up a child, in “Harmony,” are so neurotic that their sensitive, artistic daughter becomes blind; her musical gift is dependent on her remaining uncured. Four linked short stories entitled “At Phil and Joanna’s,” consisting almost entirely of dialogue over a dinner table, circulate airless, affected badinage about cancer, politics, cookery, global warming and sex. As art, they are closer to Frederic Raphael than Evelyn Waugh; as people, hell.
The short story as a form often focuses on imprisonment by mediocrity, yet the best also tend to show how the imagination enables people to transcend it. Here, the way we define ourselves through “essential taste,” caused by physical or temperamental deformity, lies at the heart of these stories—and the result is that almost all are pot-bound. The two most heart-rending are “Marriage Lines,” about a widower returning to the Scottish island where he and his wife had been happy together, and “Pulse,” in which a man describes his father’s tender, agonised care of his dying wife. Both have the adamantine hardness of observed truth concerning the human need in dying for “something with rules, laws, answers, and an overall solution; something fixable.” There is no way out: the human condition is terminal.
The best story in Pulse comes in the second half, which is stronger, more experimental and more purposeful. “The Limner” is historical, and concerns Wadsworth, a deaf-mute artist whose closest relationship is with his art, and his horse. Admirably self-sufficient, he keeps a note to proffer to people who try to condescend to him: “Sir, the understanding does not cease to function when the portals of the mind are blocked.” Such subtlety is beyond the pompous, provincial tax collector Tuttle, who commissions a portrait and then complains his depiction needs “more dignity.”
An all-seeing eye, Wadsworth observes that “he was the client’s master when his eye discerned what the client would prefer him not to know… When Wadsworth provided his clients with their portraits, it was habitually the first time they had seen themselves as someone else saw them. Sometimes, when the picture was presented, the limner would detect a sudden chill passing over his subject’s skin, as if he were thinking, so this is how I truly am. It was a moment of unaccountable seriousness: this image was how he would be remembered when he was dead.”
The story, though complete in itself, has an energy to its writing that is very different to the rest of the collection; it could be part of a new novel. The title story, by contrast, ends with the narrator’s father choosing not to vent his anger, but shaking an insensitive specialist by the hand. It ends with the narrator saying, “I imagine my father there, not getting angry, standing up, shaking hands, turning, leaving. I imagine it.”
Is that imagination going to be used to liberate, or to delineate further frustration? Only more work from Barnes in his richer, less aubiographical vein may answer this.
