I loved this book. I enjoyed the writer’s style of story-telling, mixing two different times in history; EF’s and Julian’s whilst bringing out the joy in both of them.
The story of EF and the obvious feelings of love and admiration our narrator felt for her was both ethereal and moving. There is something altogether joyful about the book and one I feel sure I will revisit.

Elizabeth Finch turned into something of a tedious slog for me.

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.)

This felt like a book of two halves - I really enjoyed parts 1 and 3 which discussed the eponymous Elizabeth Finch, but disliked part 2 where Barnes seemed to go off on a tangent about Julian the Apostate and early Christianity. Part 2 felt factual, and indeed the couple of facts that I googled were accurate leading me to believe this was an accurate account. This essay felt strange in the middle of a fictional book, and started to drag to the point that I skipped past it to part 3.

I enjoyed the character of Elizabeth Finch and felt sad that we only met her for such a short time. The book raised interesting questions around memory - how are we remembered Vs how we want to be remembered, how we present ourselves and how history is misrepresented. It also made me think about the idea of finishing someone's work after death - is this an insult or a compliment? Can we ever do it favour? Can we ever know what they truly meant?

I have rated this 3 stars due to part 2 as this felt too long and wasn't what I was expecting from the blurb.

This was a totally different read to my usual genre. It made a nice change but found it a bit heavy at times but still glad I read it. Well done.

This is an intriguing and experimental book, probablywill not please many, and it's fine, but you can not deny it is written beautifully. The story is compelling and though might feel long at parts, but it's one which stays with you.

Thanks to NetGalley and the publisher for sending me the ARC.

This wasn't quite the fictional novel that I'd expected. It is well written of course but without much drama or action taking place. The three sectioned format with the history essay in the middle really didn't appeal to me I'm afraid.

Although I appreciate the style of this book and what is intending to achieve, it is really not for me at the moment. I received a copy from NetGalley which was requested, having read Julian Barnes’ work before, but I’m afraid I just didn’t appreciate this just now. I am sure that others, more ready and able to follow the themes and thought processes will find it much more to their tastes.

Julian Barnes's "Elizabeth Finch" (EF) has been an intriguing read; a novel of subtle humour, serious political intent and what I see as an ultimate tribute to AB. It is a book not always easy to stick to as the middle of the three sections in which it is divided, the meatier, is a draft (so not yet perfectly organised) of a possible essay on the late Roman emperor Julian (AD 331-336).
This is the story, as told by Neil, of what happened when Elizabeth Finch, historian and university lecturer (met in his 30s when he went back to university and with whom he maintained thereafter an admiring friendship) died bequeathing her library and papers to him. Notes, quotes, thoughts... EF''s papers are witness to a wide-ranging mind interested in ideas, historical and philosophical, and the connections (obviously) from historical fact to historical assessment and reassessment... Amongst them, a number relate to Julian the Apostate, a historical figure who, after Constantine, wanted to reassess the role of Christianity as the state religion and who through the centuries has been invoked in different situations and for different purposes. Our narrator is spurred by the actuality of EF's bequest to try to understand two things: who was EF and why was the figure of Julian of interest to her.
The narrator's admiration and love for EF is equal (in fact it is expressed in exactly the same words) as the one Julian Barnes himself felt for the art historian and (later) novelist Anita Brookner (AB) ‘There was no one remotely like her’ is a quote both from the novel at hand and from an article he wrote for the Guardian (https://www.theguardian.com/books/2016/mar/18/julian-barnes-remembers-anita-brookner) when AB died, and only one of a number of vignettes which can be traced to comments made by JB about his real friendship with the very real AB. So, if EF is a fictional character, whereas Julian the Apostate isn't, the fact that EF is very clearly and openly (the many quotes are exact) inspired in a real character, AB, who actually represented at least to JB's qualities of stoicism, clarity of mind, seriousness of purpose that are at the core of the novel, embodied in both EF and J and that Neil strives for.... the whole novel is thus an exploration of exemplars, that of the ethical intellectual woman, a contemporary personally known, and that of the ethical intellectual emperor, the historical figure invoked, studied, fictionalised through the centuries. The interest of exemplars, of THESE exemplars in particular, is what makes the novel ambitious and interesting. Clearly, Barnes is worried about the standards of public and personal discourse, the lack of knowledge and poverty of analysis devoted to the problems (political, ethical...) at hand, and the ever diminishing possibilities of open discussion in relation to them (the conflict of the EF narrative is pointedly defined as "The Shaming"). I will admit to the novel shaming me (or spurring me!!) into thinking that I should know and think more as that would definitely make me a better, more civilised, person and citizen.

All in all, an extremely interesting writing (and reading!) artifact which does give some real pleasure and loads of food for thought. I am grateful to Penguin via NetGalley for the opportunity to read and review an advance copy.

More and more Julian Barnes' works resemble what in my mind is the "English novel", a long dissertation, spiced with philosophy, on what love is or could be or should be. In this case, this novel can be divided into three parts, exactly as the author describes it at the end. I liked the first one the best, the second one interested me little or nothing and the third one had to be there, but if the novel had consisted only of the first part, I wouldn't have seen anything wrong with it, as long as the author included an ending.

Sempre di piú le opere di Julian Barnes assomigliano a quello che nella mia mente é il "romanzo inglese", una lunga dissertazione, condita di filosofia, su quello che é o potrebbe essere o dovrebbe essere l'amore. Nella fattispecie questo romanzo puó dividersi in tre parti, esattamente come lo descrive poi l'autore alla fine. Quella che mi é piaciuta di piú é la prima, la seconda mi ha interessato poco o niente e la terza ci doveva essere per forza di cose, ma se il romanzo fosse consistito soltanto della prima parte, io non ci avrei visto niente di male, a patto che l'autore ci inserisse un finale.

I received from the Publisher a complimentary digital advanced review copy of the book in exchange for a honest review.

I really enjoyed the character of Elizabeth Finch, and the first and third parts of the book. I would have liked more of her.
I couldn't read the middle section about Julian, but picked it up after that as I was interested to find out more about her.

I find Julian Barnes very annoying and that his writing is getting more and more self indulgent. I read The Sense of an Ending 3 times but still didn't get the point of it, and The Only Story was worse. All three of these novels seem to be about Barnes' own struggles as an older man trying to make sense of his life by looking back over missed opportunities. Needless to say, DNF.

I read this over two days and was constantly wanting to get back to it. By the end I am awestruck at the quality of Julian Banes writing and his scholarship.

He uses the tripartite device he used in ‘Levels of Life’. to create a structure allowing us to examine ideas and preconceptions in a nonheated version. Constantly changing and shifting the view/context to encourage a greater sense of ‘I hadn’t thought about it like that before.

The first and third sections focus on the life of Elizabeth Finch, the narrator’s perception of her and the final section shows how other saw her. Elizabeth Finch is an incredible construct, she is as credible and as magnetic as Elizabeth Strout’s Lucy Barton or the McPherson brothers in Kent Haruf’s Plainsong trilogy.

I must admit I’m a bit of a nerd, so I really enjoyed the middle section and the long essay on Julian the Apostate. Fantastic. In this section he creates an incredible feat of writing. It’s thought provoking and informative. The potential of an alternative world in which the alliance of Christianity and state had not happened.

On top of this you get quite a lot of philosophy! That makes it sound as if it is dry as a bone. It certainly isn’t. The writing is luminous, the characters are immensely appealing and human, and you are constantly bombarded with new things to think about and take on board. Julian Barnes creates an important sense of truth and questioning in a fictional novel.

I really enjoyed this and would heartily recommend it. In fact, although I received a free copy via NetGalley I will be buying copies for friends when it is published.

I wanted to like this, I really did and I started it with high hopes. Obviously, the quality of Barnes' writing and his erudition is not in doubt and I very much enjoyed the first part of this, the character study of the precise, inscrutable, elusive Elizabeth Finch and the hero-worship of the narrator. Unfortunately, the middle section, the narrator's essay on Julian the Apostate and his attempt to halt the progress of Christianity, lost my attention. Whilst it was a relief to get back to the main characters at the end of the book, the resolution felt a bit wishy-washy. I suspect that, if I had an interest in philosophy, I might have got a lot more from this. As it was, it failed to engage me on an emotional level and felt just a little too arcane.

Elizabeth Finch consists of three loosely-connected parts. The first is a description of the eponymous Ms Finch, a lecturer at an unspecified institution of higher education for whom the narrator, also called Julian (Oho! what’s he doing here?) a middle-aged, divorced actor whose career is on the slide, develops an intellectual crush. From this portrait, the narrator (and possibly the author, too) seems to expect us to find her as fascinating as he does. Unfortunately, I must confess I found her annoying, supercilious and glib.

After her death, Elizabeth leaves the narrator all her papers and from a few hints in a notebook he discerns a posthumous injunction to examine the life of the fourth-century Roman emperor who was his namesake. There follows a longer second section in the form of an extended essay on Julian the Apostate and his failed attempt to reverse the Christianization of the Roman empire – the moment when history took a wrong turn in the narrator’s opinion. This eventually gives way to a brief final section of speculation about formative incidents in Elizabeth Finch’s life.

It's an exploration of identity, both personal and historical, and no doubt some readers will find that intriguing. However, I’m afraid this is my idea of a really bad novel. Formless and hectoring, lacking in any drama, indeed almost bereft of incident, it seems to me to be little more than an exercise in self-indulgence.

"I doubt there are too many people interested in the answer to that question." Now that is more of the throwaway remark by our author/narrator, originally in relation to his life and what he got out of it. But it might just as well refer to the question of the book itself, and its other main, nay title, character. Our guy, Neil, is a mature student on some graduate-level history course or other, and is fascinated with his quietly, unshowily, enigmatic tutor. What she says in class, what leading questions she puts into her note-free lectures, all fascinate the small coterie of friends he has on the course, but she is ever unknowable. Until things conspire to be different – Neil asks her out socially at the end of the course, they bond three times a year or so over a quiet little pasta meal and much erudite conversation, and in the end, when she dies, her documents and books and papers are handed down to him. Will he find anything to 'solve' her?

What he will find is the impetus to finish his coursework off – partly the reason for the meals in the first place is that he never did. And so we get his academic paper as the middle chunk of this book. And we find the subject of this academic paper, who I won't bother to name however many other reviewers have not thought it a spoiler, is of note to the whole proceedings not because he disagreed with the early Christians when it comes to beards and hygiene, but because he could blame said early Christians for homogenising sexuality.

I mean the end of part one kind of killed off all surprises about the title character, but that and the essay about him kind of make the entire two thirds redundant. And that of a book I had long been skipping – the waffle she'd been spouting in class of no interest to me whatsoever. That's by far the biggest hurdle this book has – it is written by someone very erudite for people very erudite, and hang the bloody rest of us. And so, however much we kind of agree with the moral – the world was a better one with paganism and a pantheon and no hetero mono-sexuality in sight – this is a moral given in the most dry, stilted, grey fashion. This has no more pizazz to it than Finch's skirts gained when she added a jumbo safety pin to them, as they did in the 1970s. There has always been a case to be said that Alan Bennett is the only homosexual the elderly Daily Mail reader dare to allow their approval. This seems to be the only case for rampant 'be and shag who you want to'-ness suitable for the fuddy old academic Gentlemen's Club. It's the dullest, most conservative plea for pansexuality you might imagine, and it really isn't at all entertaining as a result. One and a half stars.

I found this book disappointing. It seemed to me that Julian Barnes had long cherished a desire to write about this other Julian, the emperor known as Julian the Apostate and decided to wrap a biographical essay into a novel, using Elizabeth Finch, an unusual academic, as a device.

The first section is a relatively straightforward account of the narrator's relationship with an inspiring lecturer. Had I wanted to read a biography of Julian the Apostate I would have sought out other sources: I found the central section of the book tedious because I wanted to know more about Elizabeth. However the final section illuminated very little, which seemed to align with the intention of the book which I’m afraid I didn’t understand. The speculation about Elizabeth's Jewishness involved some gratuitous stereotyping and seemed irrelevant. The opacity of her life could have been emphasised in other ways.

Using fiction to consider the problem of historical truth and the difficulty of constructing biography could have been interesting but this reader prefers fiction with interesting characters and none of these were. Reading an electronic version made it impossible to see what bits of text were quotations but some of that was probably intentional in the context of a memoirist sifting through a personal archive.

Thanks to Netgalley for the ARC

A new Julian Barnes novel is always welcome but Elizabeth Finch is a strange one. It begins as an engaging, retrospective portrait of the title figure, an inspirational and fairly forbidding adult education teacher, who is a little like a combination of Anita Brookner and Miss Jean Brodie. Its middle section offers into the narrator's meditation on the life and influence of Julian the Apostate, one of Elizabeth Finch's heroes, in which the shift in tone is quite hard-going and the narrative lost its energy for me. There are lots of shrewd observations about the history, philosophy and the decline of religion, along with more oblique reckonings with capturing identity (of both Julians) and the process of writing in general, all familiar concerns of Barnes'. The third part of closer to the opening section in tone and approach, but the middle section leaves the novel oddly unbalanced. This is no doubt deliberate, as an observation early in part three suggests: "Or maybe consistent narrative is a delusion, as is trying to reconcile conflicting judgements", but it makes it a slightly unsatisfying read.

I had high hopes for this as Barnes is usually a fine novelist and I've enjoyed his work before. Sadly, after a strong start this quickly became almost unreadable. Disappointing.

A gripping narrative, or should that be set of narratives, that I devoured in one day. I thoroughly enjoyed the explorations of story telling and mythology and how that contributes to individual and cultural identity. Amongst all the high philosophy and classical history, however, there were real characters. And I found myself almost as taken with Elizabeth Finch as the narrator was.
The reader is left to construct Elizabeth. Rarely hearing from her herself and this contributes further to the exploration of narrative and how it creates reality(ies).
I will be adding this to my A Level reading lists.

Well, this was unexpected: a writer called Julian writes about a man called Julian and uses a protagonist called Neil while I, also called Neil, read. While I can see that the “Neil reads Neil” bit is coincidental, I am not so sure about the “Julian writes Julian” side of things: is that coincidence or is Mr Barnes trying to tell us something by including a long factual essay about Julian the Apostate? I’m not sure I can answer that question.

The factual essay forms the central part of this book and is sandwiched between two more “normal” fiction sections. These two parts of the book are very reminiscent of Barnes’ previous novels “The Sense of an Ending” and “The Only Story” as an older man looks back on his slightly disappointing life and a person who had a major influence on him. In all these three books it seems to that the narrator recognises limitations of memory whilst trying to understand a person better and recognising that this is, in many ways, an effort that can never truly succeed.

The influential person here is the titular Elizabeth Finch who taught Neil when he attended a course called “Culture and Civilisation”. The opening section, the best bit of the book for me, gives us a fascinating portrait of Elizabeth Finch (Neil always calls her by her full name or by her initials, EF). She’s a memorable character with, as the book blurb suggests, challenging views.

The central essay of the book concerns Julian the Apostate and I have to acknowledge that I found this dull to read, although it is probably central to what Barnes is doing. Elizabeth Finch describes the death of Julian the Apostate as ”the moment history went wrong” (this is repeated several times to make sure we notice it) and Neil, like others of Barnes’ narrators, is looking for clues to this moment in his own life. There is a repeated phrase in the book where ”Getting its history wrong is part of being a…” and you can end that phrase with nation (a quote from Ernest Renan), family, religion or, crucially, person. This links to the ideas about false memory.

For me, this is a better book when I sit down after reading it and think about it than it was during the actual reading. It is one of those books where 3 stars feels a bit generous but 2 stars feels a bit mean.