Contemporary British Novelistsoffers readers critical introductions to some of the most exciting and challenging writing of recent years. Through detailed analysis of their work, volumes in the series present lucid interpretations of authors who have sought to capture the sensibilities of the late twentieth and twenty-first centuries. Informed, but not dominated, by critical theory,Contemporary British Novelistsexplores the influence of diverse traditions, histories and cultures on prose fiction, and situates key figures within their relevant social, political, artistic and historical contexts.

The title of the series is deliberately provocative, recognising each of the three defining elements as contentious...

The contemporary is peculiarly difficult to write about because negligible hindsight and questions of proper context make assessments and judgements more than usually vulnerable. Appraising the work of a living writer is unlikely to cover the entire oeuvre because fresh works may appear. In the case of Julian Barnes, it is also true that he prefers not to be written about by critics, partly because it makes him feel entombed rather than a living voice. As pertinently, Barnes would prefer not to be mediated by the entire book industry. He has said:

In an ideal world, a novelist – me,...

One of the few unsurprising steps that Barnes has taken in his literary career concerns the subject of his first novel. This is alluded to inFlaubert’s Parrot, whose narrator advocates ‘A partial ban on growing-up novels (one per author allowed)’ (FP, p. 99). In a long-established tradition, and after many years of drafting and honing, Barnes produced a debut that inclined towards the autobiographical and focused upon the evolution of one suburban schoolboy’s artistic temperament alongside his significant life-experiences, from adolescence through to young adulthood and parenthood.

However, written self-consciously in the shadow of numerous ‘first novels’,Bildungsromans, and...

Barnes’s second novel can be read on its own as a darkly comic story of paranoid love leading to violence and self-destruction. However, as a follow-up toMetrolandit has a context lent to it by the first book and a specific place in Barnes’s development as a novelist. Superficially a study in jealousy of Shakespearean proportions,Before She Met Mecan also be seen as a reactionary novel: an attack on the view that the sexual revolution of the 1960s was uniformly liberating. Its central characters constitute a triad of a kind that will be familiar in Barnes’s novels:...

After two comparatively conventional novels anatomising modern love, Barnes’s next book contains by contrast an unusual range of narrative types, including apocrypha, autobiography, bestiary, biography, chronology, criticism, dialogue, dictionary, essay, exam, guide, and manifesto.Flaubert’s Parrotis a novel at one remove: partly a novel about a novelist, partly a novel about a man obsessed with a novelist, and partly a novel about the business of novel-writing. It is also a strange kind of life-writing about the real Gustave Flaubert, a portrait of whose life becomes ever more complex as the identification of his parrot becomes more complicated, and the...

Staring at the Sunwas possibly to be entitled ‘A woman of the century’, or ‘Question and answer’. Barnes even considered ‘The Chinaman’s ear’, ‘Christ/God and the aviator’, and ‘The only life of Jean Serjeant’. Its final title is shared by a book by the psychiatrist Irvin Yalom, with the subtitle ‘Overcoming the terror of death’. The expression’s derivation is from the twenty-sixth maxim by the French author François de la Rochefoucauld: ‘Neither the sun nor death can be stared at steadily’ (Le soleil ni la mort ne se peuvent regarder fixement).

Barnes’s fourth novel records moments in the life...

A series of unofficial or unauthorised versions, Barnes’s fourth novel has love as its chief stowaway. Love, which intrudes into this book most conspicuously in its half-chapter, opposes history and orthodoxy because its story is individual and personal, though not necessarily happy. Love may be marginalised in old and current ‘news’, but it is a motivating, directing, inspiring force which stops history from being absurd. Barnes focuses on romantic love, but other forms of love, particularly familial, are amenable to similar deployment as forces that history largely overlooks, but without which there would be no humanity.

I can tell you...

Revisiting some of the themes and dynamics from Barnes’s first two novels,Talking It Over(1991) andLove, etc(2000) are companion pieces centred on the relationships between three characters. Stuart, Gillian, and Oliver are also the principal narrators and take turns to tell aspects of the story from their own point of view. Stuart and Oliver are unlikely school friends who, in a way not entirely dissimilar to Chris and Toni inMetroland, have developed a close but uneasy relationship into adulthood. In the first novel Stuart and Gillian marry and the unfolding story follows the loquacious and erudite...

The Porcupine(1992) appeared first in Bulgarian (translated by Dimitrina Kondevo asBodlivo Svince) and was only later in the same year released in its original English. It is the political fable of liberalism’s lack of conviction before ideological certainty, set in an East European country moving from communism to liberal democracy, and is informed far more by Bulgarian history than by that of any other country. Its human story centres on the overthrown Party leader Stoyo Petkanov, who is brought to trial for prosecution by the ambitious and aggrieved Peter Solinsky. Barnes has said of the book:

When I...

Like the appeal in his short story ‘Melon’ to think of ‘England, England and the future’ (CC, p. 81), Barnes’s extended fiction of that name is a novel of ideas of the nation over time. It is a fictional studyaroundissues such as the creation of the past, the re-fashioning of an imagined national community, and in particular the telling and selling of England.² It is a self-reflexive novel concerned with post-modernism in terms of its content, though perhaps not its form, which is broadly conventional. The novel is laden with irony but it has a sinister streak that...

Barnes has written two volumes of loosely connected short stories.¹ The first,Cross Channel(1995), is explicitly focused on a topic often associated with Barnes and his writing, the relationship between England and France. The second,The Lemon Table(2004), engages a number of themes that striate Barnes’s work, such as ageing and death. It is a collection that treats in fictional form issues raised by his later memoirNothing to Be Frightened of.

Cross Channelassembles stories of the British and Irish in France across modern history. Its closing story ‘Tunnel’ concludes by explaining that all the stories have...

Arthur & Georgeis a book about unlikely pairings and questionable divisions. It is a fiction about truth and relativity, perception and rationality, fear and authority. Drawing on the real-life investigation by Arthur Conan Doyle of a miscarriage of justice, it explores the borderlines of nationality and ethnicity, evidence and imagination, doubt and faith, fact and fiction, endings and beginnings. Above all, it underlines the power of narrative to weave a plot from scraps of unsubstantiated information, in which the key factors are conviction (a title Barnes preferred) and prejudice. These pairings hint at Barnes’s toying with duality, especially the co-presence...