The celebrated British author Julian Barnes has declared his latest work, Departure(s), will be his final book. This announcement marks the end of a distinguished writing career spanning 45 years, a journey that has produced award-winning novels, memoirs, essays, and biographies.
A Hybrid Finale Blending Fact and Fiction
Departure(s) is a characteristically slippery affair, merging autobiography with invented narrative. Barnes himself dares readers to untangle the truth from fabrication, even suggesting they "google that if you wish" to verify certain claims. The core of the book revisits a decades-old story of failed love between two Oxford acquaintances, Jean and Stephen, whom the narrator first brought together and then reunited in later life.
Barnes probes his own role in this romantic cycle, questioning whether his desire to be part of a well-orchestrated narrative cast him merely as a "seedy marriage-broker." The ground continually shifts for the reader, a technique familiar from earlier works like The Sense of an Ending and The Only Story.
Confronting Endings with Bathetic Humour
The other central 'departure' is, inevitably, death. Barnes addresses this with his signature blend of the grand and the mundane. In a notably candid section, he recounts his diagnosis with incurable but manageable blood cancer at the start of the UK's lockdown period. He imposes a bathetic humour on the event, noting it saved him from an Abba-themed wedding but that he forgot the essay on French symbolist J.K. Huysmans he'd brought to A&E.
This Pooterish persona—from fantasising about wearing a 'Booker Prize winner' badge in hospital to his habit of gluing journal pages into notebooks—allows deeper emotions to surface. The book's power often lies in these small, resonant details, like the description of an elderly dog whose "feet hurt."
The Weariness of Creation and a Fond Farewell
So why stop now? Barnes suggests it is not directly due to his health, but partly from a desire not to die mid-book, and partly from a creative fatigue. He describes the onerous task of building characters and their backgrounds, admitting "just writing this makes me feel a bit weary."
In its final moments, the book turns directly to the reader. Barnes states that he will miss his audience, offering a poignant, unsentimental farewell to the public that has followed his career for nearly five decades. Departure(s) is published by Jonathan Cape priced at £18.99.
