Looming fear
Author Julian Barnes doesn't believe in God but admits to missing Him, says Peter Stanford
21 March 2008

As a student at Oxford in the 1960s the novelist Julian Barnes used to keep a box of green index cards on to which he had copied phrases and remarks that struck him as profound. "The advice of the old," he wrote on one, from a now lost or forgotten source, "is like the winter sun: it sheds light but does not warm us." At 63, Barnes can hardly, by modern standards, be considered old, but the epigram serves rather well to sum up this slim volume of musings on the approach of death. It is illuminating and, in a lolloping sort of way, comprehensive, but scarcely warming or comforting.

Perhaps that is asking too much of any attempt to look death in the eye, when the author, as Barnes makes plain in the very first line of the book, doesn't believe in God. However, then he adds the words, "but I miss him", thereby providing the essential bit of grit in what could otherwise be a smooth, reasoned, but dully predictable account in our secular times.

Any conventional religious faith was abandoned, Barnes recounts candidly, when he was a teenager and decided that believing in God would get in the way of his pursuit of girls.

But the death of both of his parents, within five years of each other in the 1990s, set him thinking afresh about his own fate.

The result is a book that is, in part, memoir - an affectionate portrait of Barnes's father, a teacher who spent much of his adult life in the shadow of his wife, and an unflattering indictment of the novelist's overbearing mother.

The most moving passage is his final parting from his dad, in a bland hospital ward with his mother looking on impatiently. "As he said goodbye, twice, his voice cracked into an eerie alto croak, which I took as some laryngeal malfunction. Later, I wondered if he knew, or strongly suspected, that he would never see his younger son again. In all my remembered life, he never told me that he loved me; nor did I reply in kind."

While persuaded by Barnes's unflinching picture of his mother, I couldn't help occasionally admiring her no-nonsense spirit. So when her son was returning through the hospital ward after a consultation with her doctor who had told him that her recent severe stroke pointed to her impending demise, Mrs Barnes sat in a wheelchair "sticking out her sole working forearm and delivering a thumbs-down sign". She went to her death with no fuss or ambiguity. It was, she was sure, the end.

You can't help thinking that her other son, Barnes's older brother, Jonathan, a distinguished philosopher, has inherited this clear-cut approach from her. When the novelist shares with his brother the thought that he misses God, Jonathan Barnes replies with a single word: "Soppy."

The dialogue between the two siblings is threaded throughout the book and allows it to escape self-pity. The philosopher brother never departs from his entirely logical conclusion that death is the end, and refuses, moreover, to express any regret at something so inevitable. The novelist brother, though, struggles valiantly to soften this bleak assessment without fundamentally challenging it.

He goes as far as refining his lifelong definition of himself as an atheist to that of agnostic - not "because I have acquired more knowledge... just more awareness of ignorance. How can we be sure that we know enough to know?" Which is another way of putting Graham Greene's explanation of why he remained a Catholic - "because I doubt my doubts".

Unsurprisingly, Barnes doesn't reach any startling conclusions. En route, though, he's rather good at dividing up human experience into categories.

On the relationship of religion and fear of death, for example, he identifies four groups: those who do not fear death because they have faith; those who do not fear death despite having no faith; those who, despite having faith, cannot rid themselves of fear; and those - "out of the medals, below the salt, up s--- creek" - who fear death and have no faith.

He is, as you will gather, putting himself in this last group. Most of us, I suspect, would hesitate to opt for either categories one or two - especially since Barnes says to do so carries with it an implicit sense of superiority. Which leaves virtually everyone, godly or not, living in fear of death. Hence the title of this memoir. But it is misleading.

While there is comfort to be gained simply from reading an unembarrassed and frank discussion about death from one who isn't literally on the verge of expiring, Barnes doesn't exactly take any of the sting out of the prospect of finally departing this life for those who have no faith.

For all the wit, wisdom and elegant self-examination of this voyage round his future, that looming fear remains.

Nothing to be Frightened of
by Julian Barnes, Jonathan Cape £17.99