The book begins with a portrait of an inspirational teacher and scholar, the eponymous “EF”. When Neil, the narrator, is left all EF’s papers in her will, he tries to form a view of her and to “honour” her by producing a dissertation on Julian The Apostate, whom EF plainly found fascinating. This “essay” makes up the middle third of the book and is an undiluted scholarly treatise. The framing sections begin by introducing EF very well, but deliberately leave her as an enigma so the character really becomes a mouthpiece for some recondite quotations and a lot of Julian Barnes’s aphorisms.
As a dissertation it’s well written and plainly very well researched, with some reflections on the unreliability of history, the sometimes crushing dominance of Christianity on European thought since Julian’s time, theological and philosophical discussions and so on. However, if that’s what I’d wanted, I’d have read a scholarly work on Julian. I’m all for intellectual rigour and serious thought and ideas in novels, but I do want them to be novels. This dresses itself up as one, but it isn’t really. I had the distinct feeling (as I sometimes have before in Julian Barnes’s work) that he crossed the line from intellectual depth to plain showing off, and that the character of EF is often just a vehicle for that.
A friend of mine has said that she finds Barnes’s novels “self-important for no good reason”. I think that’s at least partly the case here. He plainly wanted to write a book about Julian but hasn’t been successful in turning that desire into a novel. I’m sure that many critics will rave over the book’s brilliance but it didn’t do much for me.
(My thanks to Jonathan Cape for an ARC via NetGalley.)
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