Actually, so much so that he works his entire narrative around the concept that ‘getting history wrong’ is just what the ‘crooked timber of humanity’ does it is our speciality, if you will. And, this is Barnes: so irresistibly taken by his counterintuitive conception of history. Okay, I will tell you, because its seeds are meticulously planted in Part One, in any case.

What kind of interpretation, you ask? A seemingly absurd, highly experimental one, at that.

Not unlike his other fiction, for that matter.

Let’s proceed, therefore, with some problematic ‘conclusions’, rather than ‘narratives’ – this being, ambivalently, one of the solid recurring concepts and features of Barnes’s fiction.įirst: that Elizabeth Finch is, in and of itself, an act of interpretation. But all you need to know on that front is that she is one very idiosyncratic lecturer and intellectual, teaching Culture and Civilisation – no less! – and made known to the reader through one of her adult students, Neil. Him? Isn’t it Elizabeth Finch’s story? Well, yes, it is. (Too much of him might also be the thing to note here.) Why? Because I genuinely had every intention not to particularly like Elizabeth Finch – Part Two! Why put your devoted readers through Part Two? – but there is just so much Barnes for the Barnes reader that it still ends up being irresistible. You really do know what you’re doing, don’t you? This is beyond annoying – at one level. In Elizabeth Finch, we are treated to everything we cherish in Barnes: his eye for the unorthodox forms love can take between two people, a compelling swerve into nonfictional material (this time, through Neil's obsessive study of Julian the Apostate, following on notes Elizabeth left for him to discover after her death), and the forcefully moving undercurrent of history, and biography in particular, as nourishment and guide in our current lives.īarnes, Barnes, Barnes. While other personal relationships and even his family drift from Neil's grasp, Elizabeth's application of her material to the matter of daily living remains important to him, even after her death, in a way that nothing else does. Neil, the narrator, takes her class on Culture and Civilization, taught not for undergraduates but for adults of all ages we are drawn into his intellectual crush on this private, withholding yet commanding woman. This beautiful, spare novel of platonic unrequited love springs into being around the singular character of the stoic, exacting Professor Elizabeth Finch. From the award-winning novelist, a compact narrative that centers on the presence of a vivid and particular woman, whose loss becomes the occasion for a man's deeper examination of love, friendship, and biography

Elizabeth Finch by Julian Barnes