It is also, more broadly, about wrong turns - in Neil's life and, in EF's not-so-humble opinion, in world civilization after the death of Julian in 363 A.D., with the victory of Christianity over Neoplatonic Hellenism.īarnes' 25th book features a theme that runs through much of his work: the difficulty of pinning down another person's life, whether someone you knew and loved or someone who predated you by centuries. 'Her presence and example had made my brain change gear, had provoked a quantum leap in my understanding of the world,' he writes in his posthumous tribute.Īmong other things, this is a novel about the power of influence - and obsessions. The class was called 'Culture and Civilisation,' and Neil's belated paper is a lengthy disquisition on Julian the Apostate, the so-called last pagan emperor, who was one of Elizabeth Finch's heroes.ĭespite his failure to submit a final essay on time, Neil was so taken by EF that he continued to meet her for lunch every few months for nearly 20 years.

But a bigger problem is that, tucked into his encomium is his decades-overdue essay for the course he took as a floundering 30-year-old after the end of both his first marriage and his acting career. Part of the problem is that Neil, as he's the first to admit, is a passive, rather uninteresting character. It is a tribute to the teacher referred to as EF, who wielded an outsize influence on many of her students, including the novel's unprepossessing narrator, Neil. Unfortunately, there is something inert and less than effervescent about Elizabeth Finch. His latest novel, Elizabeth Finch, is a dual-pronged exploration of both personal and ancient history which asks, 'Why should we expect our collective memory - which we call history - to be any less fallible than our personal memory?' Barnes' title character, a teacher, drums into her adult students that history 'is for the long haul' and 'is not something inert and comatose, lying there and waiting for us to apply a spyglass or telescope to it instead, it is active, effervescent, at times volcanic.'

'History is that certainty produced at the point where the imperfections of memory meet the inadequacies of documentation,' Julian Barnes wrote memorably in his 2011 Booker Prize-winner, The Sense of an Ending.

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