Julian Barnes: ‘I’ve become more left-wing because the center has moved rightwards’

Julian Barnes, 80, writes in Departures: “This will be my last book.” The interviewer seizes on this warning. The conversation in his London home will be about this new book, yes, but also about his brilliant literary career. As he did in his masterful Flaubert’s Parrot, the British author returns in this new work to a hybrid style that blends fiction and nonfiction, imagination and erudition. And once again he plays with the traps of the past and memory, as he did in The Sense of an Ending, which won the Booker Prize in 2011. In Departures, a couple, Stephen and Jean, attempt — without much success — to rekindle their idealized university romance half a century later.

Barnes belongs to a vibrant generation that also included Martin Amis, Christopher Hitchens, Salman Rushdie and Kazuo Ishiguro, and for nearly four decades he has lived among the living and the dead in a beautiful Victorian house. The walls are crowded with black‑and‑white photographs of writers and composers who have shaped his work — Flaubert, Chekhov, Philip Larkin, Shostakovich. The shelves overflow with books. A handsome 1930s billiard table sits at the center of his study. Barnes no longer plays; he’s stopped by an old shoulder injury. In its place, books pile up across the felt.

The author overcame the death of the love of his life, literary agent Pat Kavanagh (in 2008, aged 68), and lives with Rachel Cugnoni, his former editor at Penguin. He has also been living with blood cancer for years, which requires him to make regular hospital visits. “Incurable but treatable… like life,” he has written.

Question. Is this really your last book, or is it one of those literary tricks?

Answer. It will be my last book. I shan’t stop writing. I should write for newspapers and essays and things like that. The idea began to germinate when I was in my mid-seventies. I said to myself, “One of these days I’m going to write my last book, and I’ll probably be cut off by my death.” So I decided to write it now, and have it waiting, even if it was finished. But, when I was writing it, I suddenly thought actually maybe this should be the last book. I went through all my notebooks where I keep ideas for future books. They were proposals that were valid five or 10 years ago. None of them had to be written right now. As I worked on Departures, I realized I’m not bothered if I write nothing else.

Q. Gabriel García Márquez explained, at the end of his life, that he had enough skill to publish a novel every year, but that readers would know that it was no longer something that came from his gut.

A. Yes, that’s the fear. It’s in life as well, as you get older, the fear is repetition and diminishment. You do the same thing, but less well. When I started working as a literary critic, there would be all these old guys around who were writing autobiographies and dragging them out over four, five, six volumes. I thought then, ‘I don’t want to do that.’ I’ll be 80 [his birthday was January 19]. Has anyone written a good book after the age of 80? Maybe Tolstoy, but he was writing pamphlets, propaganda.

Q. In the novel, you return to the theme of memory, “a weak guide to the past,” you write. You don’t trust memories.

A. When I was working on Nothing to Be Frightened Of, a book about death and family, I wrote to my brother. He’s a philosopher and three years older than me. I said, “Look, I’m going to write about our family, you included, do you mind?” He said: “I don’t mind at all. And if your memory doesn’t coincide with my memory, go with yours, because yours is probably better.” And I thought that was the most wonderfully generous remark from anyone, let alone a brother. Since then, I’ve become increasingly interested in and obsessed with memory. Because it also declines, even though we think of it as being in a stable state. Our memory will get worse inevitably. Moreover, it’s closer to an act of the imagination than it is to an act of exact intellectual recuperation [of memories]. And that’s the paradox. The stories you’ve most told about your life are likely to be the most unreliable, because they’re the ones that you adjust very slightly. You come out of them a bit better each time you change them.

Q. In the book, Jean’s character criticizes the narrator, a certain Julian Barnes, for the kind of “hybrid” literature he writes, that mixture of fiction and nonfiction. The response is delightful: “I don’t care if you don’t like my books, but you’re wrong if you think I don’t know exactly what I’m doing when I write them.”

A. The first hybrid book I wrote was Flaubert’s Parrot. Then came, two books later, A History of the World in Ten and a Half Chapters, which is even more hybrid because it contains all sorts of things: history, art history, fiction, nonfiction, autobiography… Some of my books are more conventional, and some are less. And Jean was exactly the sort of feisty character who would call me out.

Q. Your prose has legions of admirers, but it’s not a flashy style. You follow the rule of your idol Flaubert, who said that style must arise from the subject.

A. I can’t write in any other way than I do. And my tone is probably the same from book to book. A constant mixture of humor and seriousness, and that sort of thing. But it’s true that, in the Flaubert sense, the subject matter can and does control the style. The Porcupine, which is about the end of a Soviet-style country, is written deliberately in a sort of factual way. It says this is what happened, and then this happened, and then this happened. You don’t need tricks to tell a tragic story. But it’s not something I reflect on when I’m writing. It comes from an almost subconscious level.

Q. Martin Amis, Christopher Hitchens, Salman Rushdie, Ian McEwan, yourself…what happened to bring about that glorious and avant-garde generation in British literature?

A. There were two factors. First, we were partly lucky that society was changing. In the old world, it was normal to be a man to become a well-known writer, and you didn’t hit your stride until you were about 40, 50, or 60. As it happened, quite a few of us came along at the same time; we were interesting and much younger. It was also helped by a promotion called Best of Young British Novelists, with the color photo of 18 of us in Granta magazine. Literary fiction was becoming sexy, and also it was becoming multicultural. On that list were Salman Rushdie, Buchi Emecheta, Shiva Naipaul, and Kazuo Ishiguro. It wasn’t the old white school. Also, publishers responded to the phenomenon by paying us more money.

Q. You didn’t come from a literary family. Did you always know your calling?

A. It was a very strange thing to want to be in my family. Our only published work was a letter my mother sent to the newspaper. They published it, she cut it out, and it put it on the mantelpiece. I wanted to be a good reader. And in my early twenties, I did little bits of book reviewing. But I wasn’t a very confident young man. Writing journalism gave me that confidence because people read what I’d written the next day. That’s why I still love doing journalism. With a novel, you might have to wait up to a year to get a response. By which time, you’ve half forgotten it.

Q. How did your first novel come about?

A. It took me between six and seven years to write Metroland. If you’re 25, even 30, and you read all the masterpieces, you wonder what more you can add to this vast corpus of great literature. You have to slightly disconnect from the reality of that situation, from the reality of the situation that there are lots of geniuses out there over several centuries.

Q. P.V.S. Naipaul said, like many others, that the novel as a genre was exhausted. Then he devoted himself fully to that vocation and went on to win the Nobel Prize in Literature, as you note. Is the novel still alive?

A. I do believe so. Literature has an advantage over other arts, which tend to develop chronologically. One artistic movement succeeds the previous one, very progressively. Literary fiction doesn’t work that way. One of my favorite moments in literature occurs in the second volume of Don Quixote. He’s with Sancho Panza at a tavern, and he overhears a group of people at another table discussing the first book of Don Quixote. What was that? Postmodernism? Self-referentiality? All those terms academics use now… and it’s there in 1615. When I first read it, I told myself there was nothing new there. That’s why I don’t think of past writers as figures who have been left behind. I imagine an enormous table, and we’re all seated around it, some on smaller chairs than others. It’s a sort of crisscross dialogue that not only keeps the genre alive, it keeps your relations to previous writers alive.

Q. Some, like John Banville, lament that today a white, male author has a harder time getting published or winning awards. But you defend the new generation of writers.

A. Absolutely. Otherwise, white male literature becomes an autocracy. My favorite 19th-century British novels are all written by women, like George Eliot’s Middlemarch or Jane Austen’s Persuasion. And my favorite postwar British novelist is Penelope Fitzgerald.

Q. Some of your books, such as The Man in the Red Coat, were a nostalgic lament for the European culture in which England was once deeply embedded. What lies ahead for the United Kingdom as we mark the 10th anniversary of the Brexit referendum?

A. I simply don’t know. All the opinion polls show that Brexit is thought to be a disaster, and clearly has been a commercial disaster. But it’s also a disaster that no party dares to say, “look it’s obvious we have to go back into the European Union.” It’s a no-brainer. But everyone is scared. They’re afraid of Nigel Farage and his Reform UK party; before, they were afraid of holding another referendum and losing again. There’s a lack of forcefulness or even direct talk. The prime minister, Keir Starmer, is obviously a decent man, but not a fantastically impressive politician. He just keeps proposing minor adjustments to trade with the EU that are going to have little impact. He doesn’t want to do anything if it sounds major. Britain used to like to think of itself as a gateway between Europe and the U.S. All that has completely changed. Trump and his party don’t give a damn about that. In fact, they hate Europe. That alone should encourage the U.K. and Europe to become very close to one another, to act with one voice.

Q. During the years of George W. Bush and the Iraq War, your friend Christopher Hitchens was completely seduced by that war effort, by the world of the neocons.

A. Hitchens was very left-wing in his young days. He worked with me at the magazine The New Statesman. But, firstly, he always thought that Britain was too small a stage for him. And liberal America [as they call progressivism there] loved him. University students adored him. He was the best arguer I’ve ever seen. He had an enormous memory which was not affected by a credible amount of drink that he took. It wasn’t exactly that he moved from the left to the right, which is the traditional thing. He was seduced by American power, and it came to a head with the Iraq War. Because he knew everything about the places that America didn’t know so much about. He was very pro the Iraq War. I thought that it was a disaster.

Q. You have written about how you, an author who was never particularly politicized, with rather moderate ideas, have become more left-wing with age.

A. The center has moved rightwards. And proposals that are quite modest, such as the idea that railway lines should be publicly owned, just like water or electricity, have become very much in line with Jeremy Corbyn’s [the former Labour leader, who steered the party towards positions considered very left-wing] ideas, when in reality they are quite centrist.

Q. You are the most Francophile writer of your generation. In France, they adore you, and you have had a love affair with the country for decades. At 80, where do you feel you belong in the world now?

A. I’ve lived in this house for 43 years, so I guess this is my place. I feel English first; then European; and finally, lastly, British. British means the Empire, the Crown. It means that distorted view of our history. Being English is less arrogant, more peaceful, more decent. The trouble is it’s now been taken over by figures like Farage, who says, “This is what Englishness is. Down with foreigners. Get rid of people of color.” I go to hospital quite often, and the number of white English people who treat me is minuscule. And it all works wonderfully, although we need to give it [the NHS] more money.

Q. In Departures, you write warmly about Martin Amis, even though your friendship ended after he decided to drop the literary agent Pat Kavanagh, your wife.

A. We had a serious falling out. If someone hurts you, you can, in time, forgive it. But if they hurt the person you love, and behave deceitfully toward her, it’s unforgivable. Over the years, Pat forgave him. Fairly quickly because she was used to writers doing bad things. But I didn’t, and he couldn’t understand, which annoyed me even more. He somehow thought that doing professional damage to my wife in a public way was just business. No, it’s not.

Q. Were you able to forgive him?

A. In the last years of his life, we saw each other a few times; he came to dinner at my house. And I felt very sorry for him because of his illness, which was horrible. That’s why I included him in my book. But without including the whole history of it all. Just to mention that he was dying, and that he sent me a friendly message. That’s fine. I can accept that. I’ve lost a lot of friends.

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