In review: Departures

Julian Barnes’ latest book is brimming with his trademark blend of playful wit and quietly profound reflection. Described as his final work, it serves as a fitting and graceful farewell to readers, bringing to a close a remarkable 45-year writing career that has spanned novels, short stories, biographies, travel writing, memoirs and essays.

In his own words, Barnes speaks of having gained a “sense of having played your tunes,” feeling that this should be his last book—published, aptly, just ahead of his 80th birthday.

Since the death of his wife, the literary agent Pat Kavanagh, in 2008, the subject of endings - and life’s unexpected turns - has remained close to Barnes’ thoughts. Though Departures is narrated by a voice that is at times elusive and unreliable, it offers a subtle and inventive way of exploring his reflections on mortality and meaning, and on his belief that life is, “at best, a light comedy with a sad ending.”

Blending memoir with meditations on the medical realities of his own diagnosis, an incurable yet manageable blood cancer, the book is threaded with moments of clarity and quiet brilliance. It looks back across a long and distinguished career, offering glimpses of the wit, candour and intelligence that have made Barnes one of the nation’s most admired writers.

One of Barnes’ most remarkable gifts is his ability to draw readers into the quiet, everyday emotions that shape our lives - feelings that are at once trivial and deeply significant - rendered luminous through his words. As a novelist, he has long been adept at playing the quiet architect of his characters’ worlds, exploring themes of memory, identity, love and ageing with a prose style that is unmistakably his own.       

Julian Barnes won the Booker Prize in 2011 for The Sense of an Ending, having previously been shortlisted three times. In 2004, he was appointed a Commandeur de l’Ordre des Arts et des Lettres, and his many honours also include the Somerset Maugham Award and the Geoffrey Faber Memorial Prize. He also won the Jerusalem Prize in 2021.