Julian Barnes has announced that his latest novel, Departure(s), will be his final book, bringing a close to a 45-year writing career that has spanned novels, short stories, memoirs, essays, biography, travel writing, and translation. The book, which the author describes as a hybrid of memoir and fiction, reflects on failed love, ageing, and death.
Barnes blends autobiography with invented characters, daring readers to distinguish between the two. One of the characters, Jean, criticises this approach: 'This hybrid stuff you do – I think it’s a mistake. You should do one thing or the other.' The novel revisits a love triangle from Barnes's past, in which he introduced Jean to Stephen at Oxford, witnessed their affair's rise and fall, and later reintroduced them in middle age, only for the cycle to repeat.
The story raises questions about Barnes's own role and motives, as he admits to a brief, unsuccessful sexual encounter with Jean. The narrative echoes themes from his earlier works, including Talking It Over, Love, Etc., The Sense of an Ending, and The Only Story.
Barnes also reveals his diagnosis with incurable but manageable blood cancer, which occurred at the start of the Covid-19 lockdown. With characteristic bathetic humour, he notes that the diagnosis at least got him out of an Abba-themed wedding reception, and that he remembered to bring a crossword puzzle and chocolate to A&E but forgot a piece he was writing on the author JK Huysmans.
The tone of Departure(s) is rational, romantic, and rueful, as Barnes examines the mundane grandiosity of human attempts to confront mortality. The novel serves as both a farewell and an exploration of 'departure without subsequent arrival'—death itself.
