Julian Barnes has published Departure(s), described as his last book, blending memoir, fiction, and essay on themes of memory, love, and mortality. The narrative spans timelines from the 1960s to the pandemic years, featuring a story of two Oxford friends who fall in love twice. Barnes, diagnosed with a rare blood cancer in 2020, reflects on ageing, illness, and the nature of writing.
Julian Barnes's Departure(s) opens with a narrator who both is and is not the author himself, discussing involuntary autobiographical memory and casually announcing that this will be his final book. Spanning five sections and 150 pages, the work explores timelines including the 1960s, 2010s, and recent pandemic years. It delves into meditations on memory's fallibility, ageing, illness, love, identity, language's limitations, the novelist's role, and death as an ultimate departure.
Fiction, memoir, and essay blur together, making it hard to distinguish fact from invention. The U.S. edition is subtitled A Novel, while the U.K. version states it is "a work of fiction — but that doesn’t mean it’s not true." The narrator affirms trust in novelists' "beautiful lies of their fiction" yet pseudonymizes real figures Jean and Stephen after their deaths, questioning his own promises of authenticity.
The central story, introduced in section two, follows Stephen and Jean, Oxford University students introduced by the narrator around 1964-68 and reunited 40 years later. They fall in love in youth and again in old age, with no middle to their tale. Section three shifts to the narrator's diagnosis of myeloproliferative neoplasm in March 2020 amid the early pandemic. The condition is incurable but manageable with a daily chemotherapy pill, extending life expectancy barring a 5% mutation risk. He notes, "that sounds like life, doesn’t it?"
Barnes examines memory's mechanics, comparing writings from memory, hospital notes, provisional book notes titled Jules Was, and diary entries to show what gets forgotten. Addressing the book's hybrid form, the narrator responds to criticism by saying, "I don’t mind you not liking my books, but you are mistaken if you think I don’t know exactly what I’m up to when I write them." He emphasizes that "form is as important as subject matter."
The reviewer, a Mumbai-based author and editor, praises Barnes's control, precision, and playful intellect, calling it a strong final work on his terms. Barnes previously won the Man Booker Prize in 2011 for The Sense of an Ending.