This is a story about biography and memory. The eponymous character Elisabeth Finch is a lecturer in culture and civilisation for adult learners. The reader hears her voice only through the recollection of her lectures, remembrances and conversations from one of her students. We know that her ‘ideas are not to everyone’s tastes’. As a historian she has a particular interest in Julian the Apostate, the last pagan emperor of Rome who was in revolt against Christianity. The second of three sections in the book is a recounting of that history. The detail in that section is in contrast to the snippets the reader gets in order to understand Elisabeth from her student and friend Neil, other students and her brother.

Elizabeth was in revolt against lazy thinking and as the narrator Neil states he sometime gets ‘confused between memory and research’. The history of those we know is personal, unreliable and incomplete and this is why Neil cannot finish his book about Elizabeth and the reason her own research was incomplete.

Thanks to Netgalley and Random House UK, Vintage for a review copy.

Lovely writing but didn't connect as much with the book unfortunately. Found the concept very interesting but turns out not to be the book for me.

This wasn’t a book that fully resonated with me although the overarching story of a person, Neil, thinking back on an important relationship with a flawed and somewhat unknowable character, Elizabeth Finch, and the impact that meeting them had on their lives, was very interesting and enjoyable. I didn’t connect with the middle portion which is given over to a very detailed telling of the life of Julian the Apostate, an historical character that Elizabeth was very interested in - a fact Neil discovers upon reading her notebooks after her death. As a way to honour Elizabeth, and I think as a way to work through his feelings about her death, Neil studies Julian and the impact his life and actions have had on modern living. The lack of connection is totally a ‘me’ problem rather than it being a criticism of the writing - I fully understand the need to include this in the book, as it is a celebration of philosophy and thinking for ourselves.
Neil’s feelings for Elizabeth, and the impacts her passing and reading her notes have on him, are beautifully written and I truly believed how important a person she had been to him without it ever coming across as overblown or melodramatic. The theme of a life and talent squandered was well-drawn too, it’s something that I think a lot of us ponder as we get older…did we reach our potential? Did we disappoint those who knew we had more in us?

The story:
Neil first meets Elizabeth Finch (EF to her pupils) as a mature student, taking part in her course on ‘Culture and Civilisation’. EF is an original and lucid teacher, encouraging her students to think deeply and to learn collaboratively, as the Greeks did. On her death, Neil is amazed to find himself bequeathed her library of books and papers, and sets out to create the work he might have completed, but didn’t, while he was EF’s student; examining the life, influence and representations of Julian the Apostate — the last pagan emperor of Rome. In doing so he finds himself examining the life of a unique woman, by way of the memories of those who knew her, and the notes and thoughts she has left behind.

My thoughts:
“Elizabeth Finch” by Julian Barnes is unlike anything I’ve read before. The first third of the book focuses on Neil’s relationship with EF before her death, first as a student of her ‘Culture and Civilisation’ class, then as a sporadic friend, meeting up a few times a year for lunch and discussion. The second third is Neil’s essay/research on Julian the Apostate, and the final third again discusses EF’s life, this time with reference to ‘The Shaming’ — a brief but unfortunate tabloid reaction to a lecture she gave on Julian and the impact of Christianity on modern morals.

The reader never gets to know EF directly, only as reported, in the past tense, by Neil and others. So we can only see what may well be a flawed image, and EF remains as mysterious to us as she seems to have been to the people who knew her.

By completing his essay on Julian, Neil seems to be both mourning EF, and rectifying the disappointment he caused her in life. And while we learn certain facts about Neil; that he is twice divorced, has three children, etc., there is no real depth around these facts. All the detail relates to his thoughts and impressions of EF.

This was a challenging and interesting book. Not a story of a person’s life, but rather someone’s impression of (or devotion to) a person, and the impact they had on them. Each paragraph gave me something to think about, and I’m sure I will continue to think on it for some time.

Elizabeth Finch is a joy and a frustration - this is both the book and the titular character. Split into three sections, the first and last deal with Neil and his friendship with Elizabeth, the central section a discursive piece on the academic exploration of Finch's oeuvre - The Emperor Justinian. It is this middle chapter that seems the most disjointed, lacking the warmth of the central characters ruminations. Barnes' musings on the passage of time and how one reflects on past events; romanticising, idolising, misremembering; feels truthful as personal relationships define the course of human existence and roads taken.
There is much to enjoy, but the philosophising central section doesn't work for me.

This is not a book for someone wanting a good story exactly, as it's very academic and dry in places (might be just me, but I suspect others will feel the same) and all the part about Julian the Apostate was beyond me in the end I have to admit. I enjoyed the description of Elizabeth herself and how she lectured and could have happily read more about her life as she remained enigmatic to the end. I liked the way she said to a student that she wasn't there to help them, but was there to help them think. That's a bracing approach to dealing with students and her own philosophy of how she taught was interesting to me as an educator. The character of the narrator was also interesting, so I'm not saying that the book didn't hold my interest but the problem for me was the Julian part as I just couldn't get through all of it giving it the attention it deserved - it seemed as that was the reason for the novel in the first place really to get down all that research into a book. The writing as always with Barnes is thoughtful and sensitive, humorous in places and erudite - he doesn't disappoint as a writer. If someone told me they have always wanted to know more about Julian the Apostate, I'd definitely recommend them to read this book.

I loved the character of Elizabeth Finch and would love to have read a whole book about her and the biography our protagonist writes about her. I felt cheated by the segue way into the world of Julian, may have worked if it took up less of the novel. Disappointing - but could have been wonderful, maybe Elizabeth will reappear in a subsequent work?

This really wasn't for me. Whilst I could admire the writing, I wasn't really enjoying the book so I'm afraid I abandoned it a few chapters in. It just felt like heavy going and I couldn't really relate to the characters.

I'm a big fan of Julian Barnes books but this short novel didn't work for me. I felt he'd already squeezed the goodness out of the themes he was examining and all we were left with was something rather dry and flavourless. As for Julian the Apostate.... a little went a long way. Sorry. Not for me this time.

As someone who went to university as a mature student, I could really identify with Neil, the narrator of ‘Elizabeth Finch’, who is bowled over by the life-changing experience of encountering the world of ideas later in life. Ironically, the novels of Julian Barnes played an essential role in opening my eyes to the pleasure of critical thinking.

If you enjoy asking questions about memoirs and memory, and the impact of Christianity on our way of thinking, then this novel is for you.

For some people it might be short on plot and long on philosophy, and I wouldn’t recommend it as a relaxing holiday read, but you’ll still be thinking about the ideas discussed in this novel long after you’ve read it.

This novel operates on several levels, as you would expect from Julian Barnes. Superficially, it’s about Neil, a mature student who is in awe of, and possibly in love with, his lecturer, Elizabeth Finch. Neil failed to write an essay for her, so in order to compensate for this, he writes an essay based on the notes Elizabeth has made on a book she intended to write about Julian the Apostate, a figure Elizabeth kept coming back to when discussing the history of Christianity with her students. This essay makes up the mid section of the novel.

In his essay, Neil explores how Julian, defeated by Christians, was demonised by poets and historians for centuries. Neil asks how the world would look, and how Julian would have been perceived, if Hellenism, or paganism, had become the dominant belief system.

In the final third of the novel, Neil is surprised and disappointed to discover that there are different perspectives on Elizabeth Finch, whom he idolised. Neil asks how well we can know a historical figure, when we can’t even know someone we have been acquainted with? Amongst all the different perspectives on a person, can we ever know ‘the truth’, if such a thing exists? Can Neil make a coherent life out of the ‘assembly of fragments’ he has, either of Julian the Apostate or of Elizabeth Finch?

We’re left with a question that certainly made me think:
‘Imagine the intellectual victory of what most Hellenists believed - that if there was any joy to be had in life, it was in this brief sublunary passage of ours, not in some absurd Disneyfied heaven after we are dead’.

Elizabeth Finch is a fascinating figure and I would love to read another novel about her. Finally - how wonderful to read a book about a woman who is admired for her mind rather than her looks! Well done Julian Barnes. Five stars for that alone!

Thank you to NetGalley and Penguin Books for a free ARC in return for a review.

At first I thought this was a biography and was eager to learn more about Elizabeth Finch. At first I found her intimidating but reading on, I envied her students for having a teacher who brought so many fresh thoughts and opinions. Then just as I think we are going to find more about Finch through regular lunches that she has with Neil (one of her students), she passes. She bequeaths Neil her collection of books and papers.

It sounds likely at this point that Neil will write her biography, especially as he begins to meet with her brother for lunch. But first, we must delve into her writings. As Neil sees in what she has left behind, Elizabeth was certainly not sentimental. Nothing indicative of a love interest are discovered for example.

The novel meanders into an essay on Julian the Apostate which has its merits and which would certainly work as a stand alone piece. I understand why it was there – “to please the dead” but I just feel the entirety of it doesn’t quite fit the narrative here. Though maybe I am missing something since this novel is all built on threads of memories and history so if I was to look harder, I might well change my mind.

Having completed his essay, Neil is back to reflecting on the life of Liz. I liked the way a past memory of class was recalled and given a different slant after Neil discovers she was not Jewish. There are the lowlights of her life (“the Shaming”); respected as she was by those who knew her, not so by the media who took a different view to a lecture she gave. Then Neil returns again to potential love in Liz’ life, and a memory shared by her brother. A memory which is now an incomplete narrative in his head because he does not know who this unknown man is. He ends with a decision on the legacy left to him.

This is the type of book to which there are no spoilers even if I did give away the end just now. The words and musings which flow from the prose are greater than the storyline. It’s a book which was a pleasure to read. I think I could read it again and think (in the same way Neil does), “Ah, now I get it.”

Although I received a complimentary copy from Netgalley, I will be preordering the hardback from Waterstones where it is currently possible to get a signed copy with a yellow cover instead of blue.

Julian Barnes, Salman Rushdie, Martin Amis, Ian McEwan, Graham Swift and Kazuo Ishiguro have long been members of the hallowed literary boys’ club that had its beginnings in the eighties, all of them having come under fire for dominating the literary scene of the time. That their supposed hegemony might be attributed to the extraordinary variety and brilliance of their prose is an argument for another day.

Barnes has been especially prolific since the publication of his first novel, the coming-of-age story Metroland (1980). It was his third book, Flaubert’s Parrot (1984), that established his reputation as an original and powerful novelist. He won the Man Booker Prize in 2011 with The Sense of an Ending, having being shortlisted three times previously with Flaubert's Parrot, England, England (1998), and Arthur & George (2005).

Writing against the tenets of realism, grand narratives‚ and the figure of the reliable narrator, his works tend to disrupt and subvert conventional styles, in favour of historiographical metafiction and postmodernist scepticism. Barnes’ latest novel, Elizabeth Finch, is no exception. The novel touches on recurrent themes in Barnes’ work: memory, love, longing and death.

It’s a curious, compact tale about a man’s fascination with his enigmatic teacher, the titular EF, and Julian the Apostate – Roman emperor from 361 to 363, as well as a notable philosopher who rejected Christianity and promoted Neoplatonic Hellenism in its place. He uses the same tripartite device he applied in Levels of Life to structure and examine ideas and preconceptions, changing and shifting points of view in each part.
Elizabeth Finch was a lecturer, a thinker, an inspiration. The narrator's admiration and love for EF is equal to and expressed in the same words as Barnes’ own love for art historian and novelist Anita Brookner, “There was no one remotely like her.”

“The task of the present,” EF believed, “is to correct our understanding of the past. And that task becomes the more urgent when the past cannot be corrected.” Stoic, rigorous and thoughtful, she guided her mature students to develop meaningful ideas and to discover their centres of seriousness with measured empathy. Or did she? “Be approximately satisfied with approximate happiness,” she tells them. The only thing in life which is clear and beyond doubt is unhappiness,” and later, “Passion may mislead us furiously.”

As Neil, a former student who took her class on “Culture and Civilisation” in his mid-thirties, unpacks the notebooks she has left him in her will, he remembers her uniquely inquisitive mind and her passion for reason. In her writings are her ideas unlocking the philosophies of the past and exploring key events that should help us to make sense of our lives today. Fundamental to her thinking is the story of Julian the Apostate, her historical soulmate and fellow challenger to the institutional and monotheistic thinking that has always divided humanity.

Neil, the narrator, takes the reader on a journey of unrequited platonic love, drawing us into his intellectual crush on this private, secretive, yet imperious woman. His quiet passion is revealed early in the novel: “I can’t remember what she taught us in that first lesson. But I knew obscurely that, for once in my life, I had arrived at the right place.”

With two failed marriages behind him, Neil’s relationship with Elizabeth Finch – he always uses her full name – becomes an intrinsic part of his life. They lunch together regularly years after he has completed the course, and her sudden death leaves him bereft. He sets out to gather information for a biography on his beloved lecturer but is not able to find out much about her at all.

The novel is classic Barnes and will appeal to his devoted readership. But it is at times also impossibly didactic. Part 2 delves into the philosophy of Julian -- the Apostate, or Barnes himself? – in which Neil constantly reflects on the unreliability of history via his re-examination of the Roman Emperor and his philosophy.

It’s a part of the novel that borders on dissertation, and as one begins to think the author is just showing off, he makes several salient points about religion and civilisation that recall EF’s own views: “The old gods of Greece and Rome were gods of light and joy; men and women understood that there was no other life, so that light and joy had to be found here, before nothingness encloses us. Whereas these new Christians obeyed a God of darkness, of pain and servitude; one who declared that light and joy existed only after death in His confected heaven, progress towards which was filled with sorrow, guilt and fear.”

In Part 3, the intellectual heaviness gives way to Neil’s ongoing pursuit of the real Elizabeth Finch. As secretive as she was, she was caught one day greeting a man in a double-breasted overcoat. It’s a Barnesian image unforgettable in its tenderness: “She puts her hands out, palms down. He places his hands, palms up, beneath hers. She uses his support to raise herself on tiptoe, whilst her other leg, almost of its own volition, bends at the knee and sticks out behind her, like a flamingo’s.”

Barnes’ interest in the unorthodox forms love can take between two people, his veering off into non-fiction, and his narrator’s wistful return to his impossible biography makes for a novel that demands from the reader an evaluation of history, and an invitation to think and interpret for ourselves. He probes the evasiveness of truth, the irretrievability of the past, and the uncomfortable relationship between fact and fiction.

An experiment with narrative cohesion, perhaps the key to the reading of Elizabeth Finch lies in Neil’s resignation: “I sometimes wonder how biographers do it: make a life, a living life, a glowing life, a coherent life out of all that circumstantial, contradictory and missing evidence.”

This is a difficult book to read, and review!
It is entitled Elizabeth Finch and yet it is not about her. It is not even a narrative.
The narrator is gathering information for a biography on his beloved lecturer, EF, but never gets to find much about her. There is a large tract of academic prose about Julian the Apostate, after the researcher has read through the texts EF left behind.
Personally I found it very dry and unengaging.
Essentially the conclusion is you can know no more about someone who you knew and has just died than someone from the Byzantine era.

I’ve really enjoyed a number of books by Julian Barnes but unfortunately this one wasn’t for me. I just couldn’t get into this one. I felt the narrative was a bit confusing the different parts just didn’t come together for me.

This book is rteally hard to describe. It starts out as one thing- the story of an enigmatic lecturer as told by a student then seems to morph into a totally different style and genre. From a tribute to Elizabeth by student, Neil, it meanders into a narration about Julian the Apostate@s pholosophy and life. It left this reader wondering at the end, what on earth I had just read! It is quite possible that a second and more attentive reading of this book may lead me to the realisation that this is a work of genius.
Or then it may not. I shall give it a go.

Julian Barnes has written many brilliant books. This is not one of them. It felt like he had some knowledge to impart and forgot the story. I couldn't believe this was the same writer. I only hope that this not the beginning of a decline for Barnes.

A short philosophical novel that focuses on the need to constantly re-examine and re-evaluate what we think we know about history from Julian Barnes. A former student, Neil, inherits the papers and library of the eponymous teacher, Elizabeth Finch, a rigorous, inspiring and charismatic teacher of the adult education course on Culture and Civilisation intent on tea ching them to become independent thinkers. Their unexpected relationship continued beyond the course with their intellectual lunches for over two decades, although she remained a distant, self contained and elusive presence. He seeks to get to know Finch better through her papers which point to her obsession with Julian the Apostate, of whom there is a essay in the middle of this novel, from which can be charted the rise of Christianity in Europe. Although not a read for everyone, it is an engaging enough read, thought provoking, although the section on Julian the Apostate was a little too dry for me, on the impact of history on the present, on memory, truth and how difficult it is to know a person. Many thanks to the publisher for an ARC.

This is an exquisite book, beautifully written and crafted, about how we construct our past histories. By the final pages, Elizabeth Finch is still only partly known and exists differently in the memories of those who knew her.

The narrator of this story, Neil, attends a class, perhaps at university or perhaps an access course, taught by Elizabeth Finch. Elizabeth is feisty, challenging and in her own way opinionated but also hard to unravel and careful about what she reveals about herself.

Neil develops what might be called a crush in other circumstances and goes on to meet Elizabeth occasionally for lunch and then, after her death, he inherits her papers and writings. He comes close to writing some kind of biography.

However, when he meets other members of the class much later on, as well as Elizabeth’s brother, it is clear they remember quite different things. We all construct our past histories and events to suit ourselves.

Julian Barnes underlines this by regular references to Julian the apostate who might be summarised as being the last pagan defence of the Roman Empire resisting the unstoppable tide of its being swamped by Christianity. The shared name underlines a considerable sympathy for his misrepresentation.

History has been unkind to Julian because the official histories, stories and whatever have been written under the monotheistic umbrella which, simultaneously, has concealed its own atrocities and misdeeds. This is the impossibility, or at least the conundrum, of biographical writing while Christianity, once established as the dominant paradigm, can write its own histories. It all makes you wonder about Hilary Mantel!

Despite wrestling with these issues about the philosophy of history and even life, this is an entertaining and readable story with a narrator trying to come to grips with some elusive issues as well as starting to find out more about himself. The simplicity of the story conceals remarkable depth and it is well worth a read.

This book defies categorisation. Is it non-fiction trying to wrap itself up in fact or vice versa? Part 2 was so mind-numbingly boring I very nearly put the book down. Parts 1 and 3 were better but not enough to make me like this book or think it worthy of recommendation. Elizabeth Finch and her besotted would be biographer were one-dimensional people. The former had swallowed a dictionary of modern day adages.

The only sentence in the book that made me sit up and take notice was "The world is poorly ordered, because God created it by himseld. He should have asked a few friends." I think Barnes could have availed himself of the same advice.

I cannot merit it more than 1 star and this is a shame because i usually love the wroting of Julian Barnes

This was beautifully written as I have come to expect from Barnes and I really enjoyed the first part and thought it was off to a strong start. Disappointingly, I could not connect with the second half and I did lose interest. Overall I did enjoy it.