Reviews
Levels of Life
Andrew Tate
Julian Barnes
Jonathan Cape
128pp
Writing candidly about the people we love is
difficult; to write faithfully of those we have loved and lost to
the everyday outrage of death seems impossible. How to avoid cliché
or deceptive euphemism or sterile platitude? Yet literary history
is punctuated by authors who have risked speaking of personal loss:
Tennyson's In Memoriam, A. H. H., an act of remembrance
for a friend, demanded 17 years of the poet's life. C. S. Lewis
tracked the emotional crisis that followed the death of his wife,
Joy Davidman, in his viscerally anguished short memoir, A Grief
Observed. The book was raw and full of angry theological
questions and Lewis, well known as a defender of orthodox (or
'mere') Christianity, originally issued the book under a pseudonym.
Julian Barnes' Levels of Life is, then, part of a
tradition of 'griefstruck' writers who refuse to remain peacefully,
privately sad. 'Every love story is a potential grief story,' notes
Barnes, with elegant, devastating clarity. The author has recent
experience of profound personal sorrow: in 2008, Pat Kavanagh, his
wife of 30 years, died of a brain tumour. Barnes wrote powerfully
(but more theoretically) of death in Nothing to be Frightened
Of, published months before her diagnosis. The new book has
echoes of that sharp, rather abstract long essay but it is a much
tougher read. And, though written from a non-theist perspective it
is as defiantly theological in its sceptical way as both Lewis and
Tennyson's spiritual meditations.
Levels of Life is split into three short
sections: 'The Sin of Height' (an essay on 19th-century balloonists
and photography), 'On the Level' (a short story about balloonists,
photography and the risk of passion) and 'The Loss of Depth' (a
memoir of grief for Barnes' wife). The final section in which he
explores the 'lostness of the griefstruck' is as clear-sighted and
sharp as anything he has written. This triptych might seem like an
odd way of writing about the indivisibility of love and grief but
its emphasis, from the start, is on the ways in which peculiar
encounters produce new, sometimes dynamic phenomena. 'You put
together two things that have not been put together before. And the
world is changed,' Barnes observes. The spatial metaphor of each
chapter title is not just a handy device: it ties together the
book's (and Barnes') recurrent interest in the yearning for
transcendent reality that seems reluctant to disappear. The amateur
aeronauts of the 1860s perilously aspired to the level once
ascribed to the divine ('To mess with flight was to mess with
God'). This aspiration to fly - occasionally punished in
Icarus-like failure - becomes a symbol of other, more spiritual
kinds of journey: 'We live on the flat, on the level, and yet - and
so - we aspire [. . .] Some soar with art, others with religion;
most with love'. This trinity of art, religion and love is an
echo of one of Barnes' finest pieces of writing, 'Parenthesis' -
the half-chapter of The History of the World in 10 ½
Chapters - but it is also resonant of St Paul's greatest hit,
the frequently quoted commendation of love to the Corinthian
church. For Barnes, grief is not simply nostalgia, an act of
mourning in memory, but also an awareness of 'our lost future'.
There is a religious quality to Barnes' unfashionable
commitment to love. This is not to suggest that this cerebral,
sceptical but compassionate writer is a clandestine man of faith.
'I don't believe in God, but I miss Him,' he confessed in the
opening sentence of Nothing to Be Frightened Of.
Levels of Life is similarly concerned with such paradoxes
of sacrificed faith: 'When we killed - or exiled - God, we also
killed ourselves. Did we notice that sufficiently at the time?'.
The loss of God in the heights is, for Barnes, also a 'loss of
depth'. However, he continually - bravely, perhaps - refuses what
he regards as the false consolations of religion ('entitlement -
the belief in some cosmic [. . .] reward system - is another
delusion, another vanity'). After an encounter with a rare
Christian acquaintance who offered to pray, Barnes notes that
'shockingly soon' he informed the believer that 'his god didn't
seem to have been very effective'. It is tempting in such
situations to offer words of resurrection hope but another biblical
passage that encourages believers to 'mourn with those who mourn'
might be more appropriate.
Our culture is good at not talking about death. We
either make it a ludicrous spectacle in apparently endless TV and
film pseudo-fatalities or deny its reality altogether. I was struck
by Barnes' honest impatience with the plethora of euphemisms
offered by friends and acquaintances in the months after his wife's
death. We are, I think, suspicious of the language of emotion:
affect has become a debased currency in an era of manipulative
reality television. It will, I suspect, be cold comfort for the
author that this powerful, emotionally-precise memoir is the kind
of book that may help readers recover an awareness of the integrity
of their feelings. We are so surrounded by death that it is easy to
become anaesthetized not just to the suffering of others but to the
reality of our shared losses. Barnes is doing a thing most of us
are likely to evade: he addresses the contours of his grief openly
and without apology.
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