First Thoughts
“Departure(s)” is Julian Barnes's latest book and probably his last and I want to talk through my thoughts on it, because I didn't wholly love it. That said, I found it an extremely empathetic, moving, and wise meditation on life, love, memory, and writing — all subjects Barnes has returned to many times across his career. There's something almost ironic in calling it “Departure(s)”, since it isn't really a departure in subject matter at all. But these are huge, inexhaustible topics, and the way Barnes deepens his understanding of them here felt genuinely compelling to me.
Why "Departures"
The title works on a few levels. In the book, Barnes discusses being diagnosed with a form of blood cancer that isn't terminal, won't kill him outright, but is something he'll live with for the rest of his life, never fully defeating it until, as he wryly notes, he dies — at which point he supposes he'll have "won," except he'll be dead. It's also a departure from writing itself: he states plainly, on page nine, that this will be his last book.
The exact nature of this book is hard to pin down. I'd call it primarily a memoir, but it's also part essay and part novel, since at its center is the story of a couple, Jean and Stephen, and their particular, fascinating love story — one Barnes plays with our uncertainty over: is it true, or isn't it? He makes a wry joke about this hybrid form within the book itself, having Jean accuse the narrator (whom he names Julian) of writing these blended books when he should just pick fiction or nonfiction. Barnes's defence is that he knows exactly what he's doing, and it's true he's spent much of his career writing fiction wrapped in nonfiction, or the reverse, exploring memory, history, and the tension between subjective and objective truth.
Memory and Identity
The book opens with a fascinating psychological case: a condition called involuntary autobiographical memory, in which a specific sensory trigger, like the taste of cherries, floods someone with every memory of eating cherries across their entire life. Barnes wonders whether this might resolve the uncertainty of memory, letting us fully re-experience the past in detail, only to question whether that would actually be desirable at all, given how exhausting and how still fundamentally subjective it would remain. Other cases of vivid, detailed recall raise a similar problem: how could such memories ever really be verified?
This feeds into one of the book's central questions: what actually makes us who we are? Barnes opens by suggesting we are our memories, then complicates that immediately. If people lose their memories, as so many do with age, have they lost their essential self? Or is there something else, something to do with character, desire, and unfulfilled desire, that persists regardless?
Jean and Stephen
That question runs directly into the book's central love story. Barnes (as "Julian") met Jean and Stephen at Oxford in their early twenties and introduced them to each other; they fell into an intense relationship, then chose, as many couples do at that threshold moment after university, to end things and go their separate ways. Decades later, Barnes reconnected with both of them separately, discovered each had privately been thinking of the other all along, reintroduced them, and they married. It reads, at first, like a conventional happy ending, but that isn't where their story actually lands — old patterns resurface, and they've each lived entire, full lives apart from one another in the interim. Barnes gives the couple fictional names, explaining he'd once promised never to write about them, which only deepens the book's playful uncertainty about what's true and what's invented; he even challenges readers at points to go verify details themselves. But I don't think the factual status of Jean and Stephen is really the point. What matters is the shape of a love affair with a decades-long gap in the middle, echoing something Barnes notes people often experience late in life: vivid childhood memories resurfacing while the middle years blur and fade. A life with a hole in the center of it, made of what can't fully be known or recovered, and yet somehow still the substance of the whole thing.
A Writer Taking Stock
Barnes leans on other writers throughout, Proust especially, but also Flaubert and Woolf, quoting them frequently and acknowledging, with real self-deprecating humor, his own worry about repeating himself after so many books — he mentions fact-checking with scholars of his own work to make sure he isn't retelling the same anecdote again. There's a warm humor throughout in how he pokes fun at his own preoccupations, even while clearly still unable to move past them, because they're the questions that don't resolve.
It is a fairly brief book, and the love story at its center is handled somewhat lightly — I found myself wanting more detail there — but I think its brevity serves the larger meditation on time, personality, and understanding amid the general messiness of living. There's a genuinely somber undertone here too: an acknowledgment that Barnes and his generation of writers are dying out, with references to conversations with Martin Amis, who himself died not long after this book was likely finished. Barnes gives his reason for wanting to close out his writing life deliberately: not wanting to die mid-book and leave something unfinished, citing his friend Brian Moore, who did just that with his own final novel. And yet there's also real wit in how Barnes handles arriving at this stage of life, resisting some of the old-man clichés even while acknowledging others.
Is This Really His Last Book?
I'm not sure we should take Barnes fully at his word that this is his last book. He notes himself, cheekily, that we can and should trust novelists when they tell us the beautiful lies of their fiction, but that we're allowed real skepticism when they describe their own working methods. Other authors have announced a "final" book only to keep publishing. Whether or not this genuinely is his last, though, felt somewhat beside the point to me — what's here is a real, fascinating engagement with these enormous subjects, even if I found myself wishing he'd gone further with some of them. Though, of course, an 800-page final book might have undercut the whole project; there's real craft in how compressed and anecdotal this is, jumping between memories, digressions, and different writers while still cohering. Reading it felt like sitting across from Julian Barnes as he talked through his life, which is part of why I love spending time with older writers and hearing their particular slant on meaning.
A Personal Aside on The Sense of an Ending
Barnes has explored this same terrain, fiction blurring into fact, memory versus objective history, most famously in “The Sense of an Ending”, his Booker Prize-winning novel. I reread it a few years ago, ahead of the new film adaptation, having first read it in my twenties, when it struck me as fairly thin. Rereading it in my forties, it hit me with far more force, and I found the story's exploration of a man's later-life reckoning with the unreliability of his own memory genuinely profound in a way it hadn't been the first time. I appreciated the film's own distinct take on it as well. That experience of a book changing meaning as you age with it feels like exactly the kind of thing Barnes is writing about in “Departure(s)”, and I suspect if I return to this new book in another ten or fifteen years, it'll land differently again.
Verdict
I'd love to hear from anyone who's read this: do you think it's really Barnes's last book, and do you think it ranks among his best? I hope it isn't his last, honestly, though we'll see. Whatever the case, this felt like a genuine celebration of literature and of the different ways we each read and are changed by the same books at different points in our lives — and it was a wonderful, if imperfect, experience to read.
