Elizabeth Finch is not a book that everyone will like. I admit that seems a strange way to open a review that’s supposed to recommend a book, but I thought it was best to get that out of the way first. It’s wilfully resistant to interpretation, and freely abandons plot in favour of philosophical speculation, and digressions into history and religion. Readers who like clear narrative structure and all loose ends to be tied up by the end will find themselves frustrated by the book’s elusiveness and refusal to play by the rules. However, I think what Barnes is trying to here is very interesting, and I found myself throughout wanting to engage with whatever puzzle it was setting me.
The title character is a lecturer on an adult education course called ‘Culture and Civilisation’. She has highly unorthodox methods, challenging her students to think well outside of the box and teaching life lessons alongside her subject. Neil was long ago a student in her class, and she made an indelible impression on him. After her death, she bequeaths him her many notebooks, and he realises that she has one final task for him to complete.
An air of quiet sadness pervades the novels of Julian Barnes, and Elizabeth Finch is no different. Neil is disappointed with how little he has achieved in life, having been divorced twice and failed at an acting career. He ruminates on how he never lived up to the example set by Elizabeth, and sets himself to the task of sorting through her writings with the sense that it’s the last worthwhile thing he will do. It’s a deliberate choice on Barnes’ part to tell Elizabeth’s story through the eyes of someone with an ‘imperfect’ view of her, half-hero worship and half-unrequited lover.
A key symbolic figure in the book is the Roman emperor Julian the Apostate. This is so much so that the middle third of the book is entirely devoted to a short biography of him, written by Neil. He is someone that Elizabeth continually made reference to as part of her teaching, quoting poetry written about him and using his rule as a framework for the course. It’s hard not to read this as Elizabeth identifying with Julian, and Neil’s essay as actually being about her, but any conclusions are left up to the reader to draw. This open-endedness is one of the novel’s strengths, and it was refreshing to me to have an author be uninterested in making his point obvious, instead trusting in the reader’s intelligence and curiosity.
The latter portions of the book were my favourite, as we learnt more about Elizabeth while building to moments of emotional revelation. Barnes is a lovely writer, and it was a pleasure to read such evocative prose. By the end, I felt that a satisfying conclusion had been reached, even if not everything in the story had resolved. I got the sense that he had said what he needed to say, and ended when there was nothing more to tell.
Elizabeth Finch takes on many of the themes that occur throughout Barnes’ work, such as time, memory, the past, and the many ways we lack true understanding. Here, the way they were iterated were as original as they were frustrating. I don’t mind being frustrated by a book, though, as long as it’s for reasons the author intended. The feeling I got after reading was that, for better or for worse, this was exactly the book that Julian Barnes wanted to write, and that alone is worthy of respect.
Review by Charlie Alcock
An air of quiet sadness pervades the novels of Julian Barnes, and Elizabeth Finch is no different. Neil is disappointed with how little he has achieved in life, having been divorced twice and failed at an acting career. He ruminates on how he never lived up to the example set by Elizabeth, and sets himself to the task of sorting through her writings with the sense that it’s the last worthwhile thing he will do. It’s a deliberate choice on Barnes’ part to tell Elizabeth’s story through the eyes of someone with an ‘imperfect’ view of her, half-hero worship and half-unrequited lover.
A key symbolic figure in the book is the Roman emperor Julian the Apostate. This is so much so that the middle third of the book is entirely devoted to a short biography of him, written by Neil. He is someone that Elizabeth continually made reference to as part of her teaching, quoting poetry written about him and using his rule as a framework for the course. It’s hard not to read this as Elizabeth identifying with Julian, and Neil’s essay as actually being about her, but any conclusions are left up to the reader to draw. This open-endedness is one of the novel’s strengths, and it was refreshing to me to have an author be uninterested in making his point obvious, instead trusting in the reader’s intelligence and curiosity.
The latter portions of the book were my favourite, as we learnt more about Elizabeth while building to moments of emotional revelation. Barnes is a lovely writer, and it was a pleasure to read such evocative prose. By the end, I felt that a satisfying conclusion had been reached, even if not everything in the story had resolved. I got the sense that he had said what he needed to say, and ended when there was nothing more to tell.
Elizabeth Finch takes on many of the themes that occur throughout Barnes’ work, such as time, memory, the past, and the many ways we lack true understanding. Here, the way they were iterated were as original as they were frustrating. I don’t mind being frustrated by a book, though, as long as it’s for reasons the author intended. The feeling I got after reading was that, for better or for worse, this was exactly the book that Julian Barnes wanted to write, and that alone is worthy of respect.
Review by Charlie Alcock
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