Julian Barnes

Pulse Stories Julian Barnes Alfred A. Knopf: 227 pp., $25 Of our leading novelists, Julian Barnes has one of the richest historical imaginations. "Flaubert's Parrot" (the title is more or less self-explanatory) and "Arthur & George" (based on a true incident in which Sir Arthur Conan Doyle came to the rescue of an Anglo-Indian lawyer falsely accused of a heinous crime) are smoothly seductive masterpieces, which conclusively demonstrate the writer's ability to reconstruct the past in an utterly unselfconscious, entirely persuasive manner.

The Sense of an Ending A Novel Julian Barnes Alfred A Knopf: 165 pp., $23.95

Julian Barnes' latest book is called "A History of the World in 10 1/2 Chapters" (see review, Page 3). Here is a history of the man himself, similarly dissected. (1) Barnes has a fondness for playing around with form, for itemizing and annotating, analyzing and decoding. Yet his books and his manner are anything but professional. He has charm. He has wit. He has . . . (2) Beetles. What is it with this man and beetles?

When Evelyn Waugh sent the manuscript of "Brideshead Revisited" to his friend and fellow novelist Nancy Mitford, her response was enthusiastic, except for wishing that his protagonist was less dim and had a little more glamour. But, of course, Waugh was making a conscious artistic decision, and Julian Barnes has made a similar choice in his brief novel, which Tuesday was awarded England's Man Booker Prize. Tony Webster, the middle-aged, middle-class, middle-of-the-road narrator of "The Sense of an Ending," has few illusions about himself or the safe path he has chosen.

Imagine a fictional blend of "Tristram Shandy," "Brave New World" and Flaubert's tale, "A Simple Heart." Or don't, maybe. You could argue that there are suggestions of all three in Julian Barnes' "Staring at the Sun." But mixing such vastly different hues produces brown, and Barnes is never brown. He is the English author of "Flaubert's Parrot."

Julian BARNES has long had a fascination with aging and death. "I am now older than Flaubert ever was," points out middle-aged Geoffrey Braithwaite, the narrator of "Flaubert's Parrot," the audacious novel-as-faux-literary-investigation that put Barnes on the literary map 20 years ago. "It seemed a presumptuous thing to be; sad and unmerited. Is there ever a right time to die?"

Without slighting the work of Alan Ayckbourne, Simon Gray and a half-dozen other dexterous playwrights, we may now have the ultimate example of their specialty: British drawing-room comedy, Postwar Version. A word about Postwar Version. It uses a hydroponic drawing-room. Above, is the contemporary chic of manners and customs, below, is all water. The water is full of piranhas. Above, all ironic sensibilities; below, all churning bloody carnage.

In the 1860s, a bourgeois family takes a Sunday excursion out of Rouen to gawk at an encampment of British laborers engaged in building the railroad line from Paris. The red-faced giants are reported to shovel 20 tons of earth apiece each day and to devour 12 pounds of beef. A bluff Englishman of the John Bull variety falls into conversation at a Paris bar in the 1920s.

"Fiction," says Julian Barnes, "is as intimate as sex." Certainly his new novel, "Love, etc.," pushes the relationship between the reader and the characters to an intimate point. Even authors Milan Kundera and Vladimir Nabokov, master manipulators, do not leave their readers talking about their characters as if they were people one knows. In "Love, etc.," the characters ask us questions. They answer questions we haven't asked, out loud, anyway.

The Sense of an Ending A Novel Julian Barnes Alfred A Knopf: 165 pp., $23.95

Pulse Stories Julian Barnes Alfred A. Knopf: 227 pp., $25 Of our leading novelists, Julian Barnes has one of the richest historical imaginations. "Flaubert's Parrot" (the title is more or less self-explanatory) and "Arthur & George" (based on a true incident in which Sir Arthur Conan Doyle came to the rescue of an Anglo-Indian lawyer falsely accused of a heinous crime) are smoothly seductive masterpieces, which conclusively demonstrate the writer's ability to reconstruct the past in an utterly unselfconscious, entirely persuasive manner.

The perfect epigraph for "Nothing to Be Frightened Of" would be the haunting Latin refrain which concludes each stanza of a poem by the 15th century Scottish writer William Dunbar: "Timor Mortis conturbat me." ("The fear of death distresses me.") It is certainly the leitmotif that runs through this odd book -- part family memoir, part meditation on death and dying -- by British novelist Julian Barnes.

THESE days, the formidable Sir Arthur Conan Doyle (1859-1930) suffers the curious fate of being less famous than his fictional creation Sherlock Holmes. This, however, was not always so.

Julian BARNES has long had a fascination with aging and death. "I am now older than Flaubert ever was," points out middle-aged Geoffrey Braithwaite, the narrator of "Flaubert's Parrot," the audacious novel-as-faux-literary-investigation that put Barnes on the literary map 20 years ago. "It seemed a presumptuous thing to be; sad and unmerited. Is there ever a right time to die?"

Reflections on sickness, as warning of our own mortality or as metaphor of civilization's sins, began with the biblical plagues. Three recently published books, whose writing spans a full century from 1887 to 1987, remind us that illness is a period piece. Time and place define our maladies, along with their treatments, determining how dire is our case and, crucially, who shall be saved. Struggling to find a language of sickness, one not hobbled by metaphor, all writers acknowledge defeat.

"Fiction," says Julian Barnes, "is as intimate as sex." Certainly his new novel, "Love, etc.," pushes the relationship between the reader and the characters to an intimate point. Even authors Milan Kundera and Vladimir Nabokov, master manipulators, do not leave their readers talking about their characters as if they were people one knows. In "Love, etc.," the characters ask us questions. They answer questions we haven't asked, out loud, anyway.

What do we talk about when we talk about love? According to Mike Nichols and Elaine May, Americans talk about guilt, the French about menages a trois and the English about hats. But that was 40 years ago, when trans-Atlantic romance was for the wealthy few and our loves and our betrayals were relatively homogeneous.

This land of such dear souls, this dear dear land, Dear for her reputation throughout the world, Is now leased out, I die pronouncing it, Like to a tenement or pelting farm -- WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE, "RICHARD II" **** On one level, Julian Barnes' latest novel, "England, England," can be summed up as The History of the World in One Amusement Park.