As the celebrated author Julian Barnes approaches the publication of what he has announced will be his final novel, Departure(s), at the age of 80, it is a fitting moment to reflect on a remarkable literary career. Barnes, who won the Booker Prize in 2011, has consistently delivered witty, profound, and formally inventive fiction for over four decades. Here, we assess and rank his finest works.
The Early Experiments and Breakthroughs
Barnes's journey began with a fascinating duality. In 1980, the same year he published his official debut Metroland, he released Duffy under the pseudonym Dan Kavanagh. This briskly written crime novel, featuring a bisexual private investigator, was praised by Martin Amis as "refreshingly nasty" and showcased Barnes's sharp prose from the outset.
His true breakthrough, however, came in 1984 with Flaubert's Parrot. This inventive novel, a playful meditation on biography, art, and grief centred on a doctor's obsession with Gustave Flaubert, announced Barnes as a major literary force. It masterfully blended fiction, essay, and even an exam paper, creating what many consider his signature work.
Mid-Career Mastery and the Booker Win
The late 80s and 90s saw Barnes at his most ambitiously experimental. A History of the World in 10½ Chapters (1989) is a dazzling novel-in-stories that ranges from Noah's Ark to a futuristic heaven, exploring history, faith, and love with immense intellectual energy.
In 1991's Talking It Over, he brought a fresh, tragicomic perspective to a classic love triangle, using multiple first-person narrators to question the nature of truth. This was followed by the sharp political satire of The Porcupine (1992), a concise novel dissecting the trial of a fallen communist leader.
The long-awaited Booker Prize finally arrived in 2011 for The Sense of an Ending. This exquisite, concise novel delves into memory, remorse, and the unreliability of the past as an elderly man re-examines his youth. Its exploration of how we narrate our own lives is both haunting and deeply moving.
Later Works and a Literary Legacy
Barnes continued to innovate in the 21st century. The Lemon Table (2004) is a brilliant story collection unified by themes of ageing and mortality, while Arthur & George (2005) marked a turn towards a richly detailed historical novel based on a real-life miscarriage of justice involving Sir Arthur Conan Doyle.
More recently, The Noise of Time (2016) stands as one of his finest later works. A profound and intimate portrait of the composer Dmitri Shostakovich living under Soviet tyranny, it wrestles with questions of art, power, and moral compromise.
From the speculative future glimpsed in Staring at the Sun (1986) to the musical and personal reflections in his stories, Barnes's career is a testament to intellectual curiosity and stylistic reinvention. As he prepares his final novel, his body of work remains a cornerstone of contemporary British fiction, celebrated for its wit, humanity, and relentless questioning of life's biggest themes.
