An Enigmatic Woman: On Julian Barnes’s “Elizabeth Finch”

A MAN, comfortable in both wealth and middle age, is living alone. The man is British, naturally, with a careful name like Christopher or Paul, though he often dabbles in Francophilia. He is privately educated, well spoken, and unassuming. In the retelling of his own life, he is reticent: the details of his situation are offered to us like pulled teeth. If he has children, they are counted and sometimes named. If he has been married, the marriage is described by its ending and not a lot else. The man is, for the most part, commonplace. He is safe, even — safe enough at least to seem like a reliable narrator.

But as he will come to explain, the story he is telling is not about him, not really. See, the thing is, the man has become an obsessive of some kind. The obsession might be a memory, an object, or a person, but it will be enigmatic. Whichever it is, the man — fastidious in manner and an incurable gossip — will linger on each reflection or artifact, until the obsession reaches its natural, anticlimactic ending. And somewhere along the way, he is going to tell you a lie.

This man is the Barnesian narrator, one that has been appearing in mildly different shapes since Julian Barnes’s debut novel, Metroland (1980), and one that reached its peak in the Man Booker Prize–winning The Sense of an Ending (2011). “[E]xcellent in its averageness!” was Geoff Dyer’s conclusion in a review of the latter for The New York Times, but the phrase is better applied to this recurrent Barnesian man, whose averageness is his excellence.

Take Neil, for example, the latest iteration and the narrator of Barnes’s new novel Elizabeth Finch. Neil is multiply divorced, a distant father to adult children, and floating in the anesthesia of his later life. Some details are provided about his background: he was once a fairly average actor, before moving on to growing “mushrooms and, later, hydroponic tomatoes,” and working various odd jobs; his first wife, a better actor, “decided it would be better for her career if she lived in London. And if I didn’t. So that was that, really.” And that is about that, really, in terms of his history. He has another failed marriage somewhere, and manages to eventually name his children, whom we never actually meet. But, as with his predecessors, he does have an explanation for the lack of biography: “I live alone, and have done for some years. You probably guessed. Though, as I may have said, this is not my story.”

The story, of course, is concerned instead with Neil’s obsession, the eponymous Elizabeth Finch. In fact, it is she who opens the novel: “She stood before us, without notes, books or nerves. The lec­tern was occupied by her handbag. She looked around, smiled, was still, and began.” The quality of obsession is immediately apparent — Neil insists on starting “at ground level,” from which point he spends a few pages describing Finch’s clothing, hair, smoking habits, what she might wear at the beach (unimaginable); the accumulation of details has about it the scent of a stalker. But we begin with the exterior of Elizabeth Finch — or “EF,” as Neil refers to her — because her interior life is so peculiarly mysterious. We know that she teaches a course in “Culture and Civilisation” to adult students, and teaches it incredibly well. Her erudite and independent intelligence provokes a strong response from all who meet her. Here she is, introducing her course:

The best form of education, as the Greeks knew, is collaborative. But I am no Socrates and you are not a classroom of Platos, if that is the correct plural form. None­theless, we shall engage in dialogue. At the same time — and since you are no longer in primary school — I shall not dis­pense milksop encouragement and bland approval. For some of you, I may well not be the best teacher, in the sense of the one most suited to your temperament and cast of mind.

The group of students Neil attaches himself to all have their theories and fantasies, but none really has a clue who the “real” Finch is. It is Neil’s perspective on Finch, though, that we are hitched to, one of adoration and mythmaking. It is Neil who, once the course is over, continues to meet Finch for biannual lunch dates, where “[t]he rules were clear, without ever really being explained. I would arrive promptly at one; she would be sitting there, smoking.” And when Finch dies not long into the novel, it is Neil to whom she bequeaths her notebooks and personal library. If she is to be compared to Socrates, then Neil is her Plato.

Loosely based by Barnes on fellow British novelist Anita Brookner, Finch is effortlessly fluent, producing seamless lectures without a script, throwing out aphorisms and perfectly cut philosophies in conversation, at once unsentimental and completely committed to the study of art, history, and life. Posthumously — her death is presented suddenly by Barnes but takes place at least 20 years after Neil first meets her — her notebooks shimmer with the same clarity of thought. While Neil sorts through her papers, he offers examples of her private reflections: “And do not make the mistake of thinking me a lonely woman. I am solitary, and that is quite a different matter. To be solitary is a strength; to be lonely a weakness.”

Between her classes and her notes, we learn that Finch’s research centered on monoculturalism — on the restriction and damage performed by almost any ideology carrying that mono prefix:

“Monotheism,” said Elizabeth Finch. “Monomania. Monogamy. Monotony. Nothing good begins this way.” She paused. “Monogram — a sign of vanity. Monocle ditto. Monoculture — a precursor to the death of rural Europe. I am prepared to acknowledge the usefulness of a monorail. There are many neutral scientific terms which I am also prepared to admit. But where the prefix applies to human business. … Monoglot, the sign of an enclosed and self-deluding country. The monokini, as facetious an etymology as it is a garment. Monopoly — and I do not refer to the board game — always a disaster if you give it time. Monorchid: a condition to be pitied but not aspired to. Any questions?

We sense here the careful, persuasive voice of Barnes himself, who has not been shy in his criticism of Britain’s recent politics. Elizabeth Finch is predominantly set sometime before the internet reached its height, and far before there was a Brexit vote (later, the latter gets a single, melancholy mention), but this positioning is a tactical decision — the suggestion being that, today, the dangerous prefix has caught hold. Now, the internet is rife with mono-agendas and reactionary social clubs; now Britain is festering in its own patriotism. In reference to this national pride, Finch quotes Ernest Renan: “Getting its history wrong is part of being a nation.”

While Britain might be one focus of the novel’s criticism of monoculture, it is not the key interest of Finch herself. Her concern is instead the contentious figure of Julian the Apostate, short-term ruler of Rome and last line of defense against Christian monotheism. “The emperor’s full name was Flavius Claudius Julianus,” Barnes writes, “but since the victor acquires the spoils, and these spoils include not just the narrative and the history but also the nomenclature, he will be known thereafter as Julian the Apostate.” Judging from Finch’s reading lists and notes, it appears that there might have been a book in the works. Neil, whose daughter once titled him “The King of Unfinished Projects,” decides to continue where Finch left off.

The result of Neil’s efforts — reading through Finch’s bibliography, collating her notes into a complete essay — interrupts Elizabeth Finch entirely, dividing the narrative in half. As anyone who has read The Man in the Red Coat (2019) or Levels of Life (2013) will know, Barnes is a phenomenal biographer of both real and hypothetical lives, and so this middle section of the novel is by no means a difficult read. Julian the Apostate is brought into relief via potted personal history and posthumous influence. His position between the old world of Roman deities and Hellenistic ritual, and the encroaching beast of Christianity with its one jealous god, is deftly illustrated. Barnes establishes in a relatively short space a complex and controversial figure, one who “is often described — and not just by his militant opponents — as a fanatic; even if a tolerant or clement one,” who was admired by both Montaigne and Hitler, Ibsen and Swinburne.

The problem, however, is not whether the story of Julian the Apostate interests us; it is why Julian the Novelist cuts short his own narrative to include the section. While it does neatly draw together the philosophical queries introduced by Elizabeth Finch, it does not seem enough to warrant such a lengthy interlude amid the story of Finch herself. There are some efforts to draw her life into closer contact with the Apostate, but the result feels melodramatic, minimizing to both Finch and Julian. And beyond that, there is the larger issue of Neil, whose voice is almost entirely erased by Barnes’s for the duration of the essay. While in the past his narrators might have been excellent in their averageness, since The Only Story (2018), they seem to have become only average. In a novel like Elizabeth Finch, this becomes an even bigger problem, since the whole Finchian enterprise, and whether we believe her to be worth following beyond the grave, depends primarily on Neil.

Given that the novel’s central theme is the inherent failings of monocultures, we are never encouraged to fall for his narration completely. From the very beginning, Barnes is warning us off exactly that. “I wanted Elizabeth Finch to myself,” Neil says after her death, “and so I took her home in my head.” He is possessive of the woman he has built in his imagination, jealous of those who might have had a closer relationship with Finch than he did, and desperate for the reader to burn a candle at her shrine. After one example of Finch’s Socratic replies, Barnes takes us aside to make sure we understand: “Do you see what I mean? The shimmer of her phrasing, the lustre of her brain.”

This sycophancy, and Neil’s struggle to see Finch as anything but a high priestess, makes sense in the story, even if we find it a bit exhausting. What doesn’t quite fit, however, and what undermines Barnes’s work, are Neil’s other flaws as a narrator. Much of his behavior reads as almost antagonistic towards Finch: he insists on some form of biography, even after admitting that “she was not in any way a public person; nor would she have wanted to be”; after a lecture of Finch’s is picked up by the tabloids, and her name is dragged through the mud, Neil personally dubs the event “The Shaming”; and, as if we have wandered into some hypermasculine thriller, he at one point describes Finch as “seductive, but not in any conventional way.” The question of why Finch ever bequeathed her papers to such a man is never answered, but then, there doesn’t seem to be any reason Barnes could have given to make it plausible.

This leads us to the strange fact that the life of both the novel and the woman are dictated by three men. When looking for permission to write her biography, Neil turns to Finch’s surviving brother, Christopher, a self-proclaimed simple kind of guy (Barnesian in all but intelligence). Christopher concludes, though he never understood anything intrinsic about his sister, that “[s]he’s dead, you’re alive, it’s your call.” The third man is barely more than a ghost — a possible lover of EF’s whom Christopher saw once, from a distance. This, however, is enough to spur his obsession: “Whenever I thought about her past, it would resolve or reduce itself into the quest for the man in the double-breasted overcoat. That image Chris had supplied hung down before me like a pictorial enigma.” An enigmatic woman, dedicated to the pursuit of independence, even apostasy — who wrote that “to be solitary is a strength” and lived against the demands put upon her gender — is here reduced to the men who may or may not have loved her.

In the end, Elizabeth Finch is a novel of ideas presented as a deconstructed biography. Barnes shuffles the pieces around, those same elements that his male protagonists have wrestled with for years: How important is religion? What might marriage to a woman mean? Am I performing this life as well as I could be? What is this missing thing I can feel in my chest? Am I good in bed? The problem here, however, is that the pieces never quite lock into place. Indeed, they seem to have come from different puzzle boxes, shaken up and then cut to fit. Running through it all, there is a recognizably liberal anxiety about the world — about Brexit and its Europhobia, about cold internet rhetoric, about Trump voters, and ultimately, about our inability to think outside of binaries — but what is allowed to evaporate along the way is Elizabeth Finch herself.

A comparison: in Barnes’s 1984 novel Flaubert’s Parrot, a man’s search for a unique stuffed bird leads to a museum full of replicas. In Elizabeth Finch, we are left with a man and his distracted taxidermy. In other words, a case of the wholly average man failing to tell an excellent lie.

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Connor Harrison is a British writer living in Montreal. His work has appeared at The Evergreen Review, Literary Review, and The Moth, among others.