IS CHRISTIANITY ALL IT’S CRACKED UP TO BE?
Novelist Julian Barnes poses complex questions in Elizabeth Finch
I’ve been mixing fiction and non-fiction since ... 1984. That’s nearly 40 years ago so you would think people would get used to the fact that this is what I do sometimes when that’s where the story takes me.
Julian Barnes
Elizabeth Finch Julian Barnes Random House Canada
There’s a touch of mischief in the way Julian Barnes describes his new novel, Elizabeth Finch. “It’s two-thirds fiction and one-third non-fiction,” he says cheerfully. However, it’s a lot more than that.
In the case of the title character, the book delivers a portrait of a charismatic academic of remarkable intellectual and moral rigour. But that rigour leads to some incendiary questions — questions that, as the Booker-winning Barnes acknowledged in a recent Times of London interview, will probably prove offensive to many Christians.
For example — did the triumph of Christianity some 2,000 years ago mark the point when the history of Europe went badly wrong?
“I think that’s a terribly interesting theory,” Barnes says by phone from his home in north London. “I’m not enough of a historian to know. But I wanted to plant that notion in the reader’s mind strongly enough, that reader will think about it.”
Which is why, halfway through the book, Barnes plants an essay about Rome’s last pagan emperor, Julian the Apostate, whose death in the deserts of Persia in 363 eliminated a major barrier to Christianity’s advancement.
In a celebrated interview with The Paris Review, a young Julian Barnes once argued the task of the fiction writer was to reflect the “fullest complications” of the world. “Did I say that?” the 76-year-old author is now asking incredulously. “That’s very pompous isn’t it?” Then he tries to explain what he was getting at all those years ago.
“At that time, I had worked as a journalist, as well as a novelist. The joy of a journalist is to simplify the world, to make it explicable ... so that a reader can understand everything that is being said at first reading. The task of the novelist is to present a more complicated version of the world, which I hope will have some people saying ‘mmm, maybe I should read it again.’ That’s the greatest flattery a writer can have.”
As for those critics grumbling about the presence of a scholarly thesis in the middle of a work of fiction, an amused Barnes need only point to one of his most popular novels, the title of which speaks for itself: A History of the World in 10 1/2 Chapters. He’s long enjoyed planting the occasional firecracker under literary convention.
“I’ve been mixing fiction and non-fiction since Flaubert’s Parrot in 1984. That’s nearly 40 years ago so you would think people would get used to the fact that this is what I do sometimes when that’s where the story takes me,” he says in a tone of amused resignation.
The new novel is filtered through the memories of middle-aged Neil, whose life will be dramatically changed by his encounter with a middle-aged professor named Elizabeth Finch. Neil is a former actor, now divorced, with an unflattering reputation for “unfinished projects.” Elizabeth Finch is the crisply challenging academic who presides over the adult class on culture and civilization that Neil has started attending in an attempt to escape his melancholy. Her impact grants him new insight into the processes of living and the shifting tides of history. It also spawns a deep and fulfilling platonic friendship which ultimately sees him become custodian of Elizabeth Finch’s legacy following her death.
For Neil, the most profound aspect of that legacy stems from her reflections on Julian the Apostate who — in her words — “attempted to turn back the disastrous flood tide of Christianity but died too soon.”
There were two starting points for this book. One came about 15 years ago when Barnes stumbled on an unfamiliar line from poet Algernon Charles Swinburne — “thou hast conquered, O pale Galilean.”
The Galilean is Jesus, and these are the pagan emperor Julian’s dying words, admitting the triumph of Christianity.
“Swinburne thought this was a disaster for western civilization,” Barnes says. He adds that because Swinburne enjoyed “a very colourful and varied sex life” it’s understandable that he would be “attracted to the idea of paganism and not having the Church of England on his neck for his forbidden activities.”
As for Julian, “he had a very vivid afterlife, first as a figure of hatred and contempt within the Christian church for 13 centuries until, by the time of Voltaire, he was regarded as a very serious figure in history.”
Barnes understands why societies need gods although he himself is a non-believer. “I wasn’t brought up in the church at all and have never seen anything that would change my mind.” But he makes it clear that his main quarrel is with monotheism which in this novel is represented by Christianity’s dominant place in Europe through the centuries.
“I do think that monotheism tends toward arrogance and persecution of minorities in a way that polytheism doesn’t. It’s interesting to read Julian the Apostate’s tract. He’s rather puzzled by what seems to him to be a rather backwater religion with none of the achievements that Greco-roman tradition had. And what we see today are more extreme monotheisms that are very punitive and militaristic.”
The other starting point was Barnes’s desire to create a character like the wise and courageous Elizabeth Finch — “a woman not of her time — somehow almost outside time — who takes the longer view and sees things more clearly than those she teaches.”
Some critics have suggested that Elizabeth is based on the late Anita Brookner, another Booker winner and one of Barnes’s closest friends. But Barnes says it’s not that simple.
“I took a bit of Anita as a moral template. She had moral rigour, as Elizabeth Finch does. She took ethical life seriously. She wasn’t intolerant but she was extremely crisp in her judgments. So that side of her fed into Elizabeth. But this is not a book about Anita Brookner in any way.
“Her intellectual interests were quite different from Elizabeth Finch’s — but something of Anita survives.”
Indeed, Barnes is wryly amused by continuing speculation over Elizabeth’s origins. “I’ve not only been told that she’s Anita Brookner. I’ve also been told that she’s Muriel Spark, that she’s my late wife or my current partner ... that she’s even based on me!”
And what should readers take away from his book? Barnes is firm in his response.
“I would certainly not want to impose anything on readers regarding what they will take away. Different readers will take away different things. But I hope they will like and enjoy Elizabeth Finch’s character and be provoked by some of the things she says. I hope they think about the conundrum of history as represented by Julian the Apostate.
“He only ruled for 18 months and in that time he became an absolute devil figure for the Christian church for centuries.
“Had he lived and reigned for 30 or 40 years and had the mass destruction of Greco-roman culture not happened, where would we now be?”