Monday, April 22, 2013

Levels of Life by Julian Barnes reviewed by Maggie Rainey-Smith


Levels of Life by Julian Barnes
Random House
RRP $29.99

This is a slim book.  It is an exploration of grief.   The grief the author Julian Barnes experiences and continues to feel, four years after the death of his wife Pat Kavanagh.   It reminds me of Joan Didion’s book ‘The year of magical thinking’ which explores her reaction to the sudden death of her husband.   Barnes is one of those writers who manages to convey expansive ideas and emotional depth in a most concise (or is it precise?) manner.    This doesn’t detract from the potency of his words, but it prevents the writing from becoming maudlin or too self-indulgent.   He still talks to his wife, two or three years after her death.
                I reviewed ‘Nothing to be frightened of’ a year or so ago, by the same author, as he explored his infinity phobia, indeed his fear of death.   And now, in this latest slim book, he is exploring not his own death but the loss of his beloved wife, Pat Kavanagh.   What I did not know, and what Julian Barnes does not mention, is that Pat left him briefly in the nineties to have a love affair with the author Jeanette Winterson.  Evidently Winterson went public about their affair when promoting one of her novels.  I only discovered this when I Googled Pat Kavanagh to see who this beautiful woman was, who had inspired so much grief.   It then of course, intrigued me to know that the author writes such intimate details of his grief at her death, but does not mention the grief when he lost her briefly to another lover.  
                Barnes comes to talk about his grief from an oblique and interesting angle.  Slim as the book may be, it comes in three parts.   The first part is ‘The sin of height’.  It is a wee bit piece-meal and disjointed at the start, but nevertheless quite fascinating too.  In this first section, the author looks at the pioneering days of the hot air balloon and photography.  The second part ‘On the level’ is where for me, the book settled in, and the author re-imagines the love affair between Sarah Bernhardt and Colonel Fred Burnaby, a hot air balloon pioneer.  The author examines the life of Fred after he loses in love to Sarah, when she moves on from him.    Part three ‘The Loss of Depth’ begins “You put together two people who have not been put together before.” And sometimes it is like that first attempt to harness a hydrogen balloon to a fire balloon: do you prefer to crash and burn, or burn and crash?  But sometimes it works, and something new is made, and the world is changed.”   And poignantly revealing...  “Then, at some point, sooner or later, for this reason or that, one of them is taken away.  And what is taken away is greater than the sum of what was there.”

                Barnes finds himself becoming a fan of Opera, something he had previously eschewed or not really enjoyed – and now, in his grief, he finds the extravagance and intensity of emotion, the cutting to the chase so to speak, where characters express drama and great grief so evocatively, he now appreciates and understands.
                It’s a strange little book in some ways, but a compelling read too.  It takes you right to the heart of grief.  At his wife’s funeral, he finds himself reading a passage from a novel he wrote as a young man, thirty years prior, when a character in his sixties is widowed.   And of this he says “Only later did novelist’s self-doubt set in: perhaps, rather than inventing the correct grief for my fictional character, I had merely been predicting my own probable feelings – an easier job.”
                And, as has been the case for the last two hardback copies of his books, this is a slim and delicious to hold hardback – it fits snugly into one hand,  the typeface is well-spaced, it’s written almost in edible chunks, and it bears re-reading for certain.    For any person recently bereaved and dealing with not just their own reaction but too the often unpredictable and seemingly inappropriate reaction of their friends - the strange beast that grief is and how we respond, then this is without doubt, almost a guidebook.

About the reviewer:

Maggie Rainey-Smith is a Wellington writer and regular reviewer on Beattie's Book Blog. She is also Chair of the Wellington branch of the NZ Society of Authors.    


                

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