Nowhere to Go

Nothing to Be Frightened Of, self-described as a “memoir of mortality,” displays the wit and linguistic facility readers expect of Julian Barnes, whose most recent book was Arthur and George, a novel based on a relationship between Sir Arthur Conan Doyle and an unknown Anglo-Indian named George. Barnes’s latest begins with a bang suggestive of both its seriousness and its humor: “I don’t believe in God, but I miss Him.” What follows is Barnes’s self-examination of his irrational fear of death and the pointlessness of such an emotion, if one can reduce a profoundly troubling psychological state to h an inadequate word.
Readers learn a lot about Barnes’s family, grandparents, parents and philosopher brother who, by the way, sounds like a true British eccentric, and who regards his younger brother’s whinging about the inevitable with affectionate (I think) scorn. But Barnes also draws upon what other writers, especially French, have had to say about the grim reaper. One often cited is Jules Renard, the nineteenth-century French author whose sometimes mordant wit and brevity may explain Barnes’ attraction to him. Stendhal appears too, primarily in the context of Stendhal’s Syndrome, a supposedly near-death experience brought on by exposure to great art that overcame the writer the first time he visited Florence. Barnes debunks Stendhal’s description of what happened, pointing out that the details are all wrong, that it cannot have possibly transpired as Beyle/Stendhal claims; he does not, however, deny the worth of the experience. The story, he says, “is true, not least because we want it, we need it to be true.” Thus too we need to believe when we are told that death is not to be feared, in which instance it’s harder to accept the convenient lie.
The fraught question of the ephemeral nature of the novelist’s output and the unreliability of memory pops up throughout the book. Memory, Barnes says, begins to seem “less and less distinguishable” from the imagination as age sets in. The novelist—he cites Ford Madox Ford, who was known for his storytelling—“could be a mighty liar, and a mighty truth-teller, at the same time, and in the same sentence.” But does any of it endure? For a few generations perhaps, but seldom longer. Towards the end of the book Barnes describes a visit to Renard’s grave in the village of Chitry-les-Mines, which shows no signs of frequent visitations. “Is there anything sadder than an unvisited grave?” he asks, knowing full well that in time every grave is unvisited.
I liked this book. Barnes is at times too clever for his own good, but he is always intelligent, always provocative, and sometimes moving as he defends his fear of death and his lack of belief in an afterlife as perfectly rational if not inevitable for a thinking person. I share many of his views and the night I finished the book just before falling asleep I had a most unpleasant dream, the details of which soon faded, but from which I awoke speaking the words, “I have nowhere to go.” Having initially remembered them as “I want to get out of here,” upon reflection I realized I was wrong. It seems obvious now that my terror was a response to Barnes’s assertion that we die only to go nowhere.