I've read and enjoyed quite a few of Julian Barnes' books over the years, though admittedly not one for some time. So it was with a general, if imprecise, feeling of literary goodwill that I started this just before Christmas. I knew nothing much about it beyond the fact the narrative involved a teacher named Elizabeth Finch; thinking back to why I requested it, perhaps for me I was drawn somehow by a synaptic overlap with Elizabeth Costello by JM Coetzee, another book involving an older female lecturer not to everyone's tastes.

Well... I took to Elizabeth Finch (or should I perhaps say, with a distinct nod to the book, EF) rather a lot. It wasn't really what I expected, but it's fairly impossible to anticipate how it unfolds unless forewarned (and that would be a pity). As a former teacher-turned-librarian, as well as someone who once dabbled in philosophy and theology, I suppose I am rather the kind of potential reader this book is aimed at. I found much of the more 'academic' passages absorbing and stimulating, keen to learn more about Emperor Julian amongst other subjects. As for EF herself, seen by us almost entirely through the narrator Neil's eyes, she made me think about my own relationship (and difficulties) with education, both long ago as a student and then more recently on the other side of the learning divide. EF would very much have been my kind of teacher, I imagine.

As he flits around territory of memory, reputation, biography and ultimately the whole of Western culture, Barnes' prose often seemed to me like an engine purring along in third or fourth, rarely going full throttle but the reader knows the extra horsepower's there when needed. Maybe the subject matter tends in parts to the overly erudite or even elitist...but when has Barnes ever been the kind of writer to dumb it down? And can such erudition and knowledge ever be a bad thing? For me at least, EF (and JB) wear it lightly enough.

I finished it this morning. I can certainly see parts of it staying with me, not least the title character. Recommended (4-4.5 / 5)

With thanks to NetGalley and the publisher for sending me an ARC in exchange for an honest review.

'Elizabeth Finch' is a short novel which has a lot in common with two of Julian Barnes's other recent novels 'The Sense of an Ending' and 'The Only Story'. Once again, an older and unfulfilled male narrator reflects on a person who strongly influenced him, trying to understand this person more fully whilst also exploring the fundamental impossibility of fully knowing them. Here the narrator is the twice-divorced Neil, the "King of Unfinished Projects", and he is looking back on his memories of Elizabeth Finch, a lecturer and scholar who taught him on an adult education course entitled "Culture and Civilisation."

The novel begins with a compelling pen portrait of Elizabeth, and a description of the impact she had on different students on the course; already, Neil's fascination with her is clear. The first third of the novel deals with Neil's interactions with her during and after this course, and reveals the ways that her thinking has influenced his. There is a particular focus on Julian the Apostate, a Roman Emperor from the 4th Century AD, whose rejection of Christianity in favour of Hellenism and his subsequent defeat is described by Elizabeth as "the moment history went wrong".

In the middle section of the novel, we read an essay that Neil is trying to write about Julian, his beliefs and his afterlife, based on notes left by Elizabeth, as he attempts to grapple with the question which fascinates both Julian and Elizabeth: "How can a religion based among the poorer castes of society, and without a true civilisation behind it, have come to conquer the Graeco-Roman world in such a short time and with such a deleterious effect?" In the final section, Neil continues to try and find out more about Elizabeth and his forced to reconsider his view of her.

Neil is, like previous Barnesian narrators, an engaging narrator, already moderately self-aware and self-deprecating but also able to discover more about himself as the novel progresses. The figure of Elizabeth Finch is very well-drawn, and the novel raises interesting questions about the fundamental unknowability of other people as Neil realises that the Elizabeth he knew is very different from the Elizabeth others knew. Barnes has also undertaken an impressive level of scholarship relating to Julian the Apostate - a figure of whom I knew nothing - and how he has been interpreted in different ages. Ultimately, however, I didn't find the lengthy discussion of Julian all that interesting - this book really straddles the genres of fiction and non-fiction, and it feels like it is more concerned with lofty ideas than plot or character. So although I enjoyed elements of this book, I was far less engaged by it than by previous Barnes novels, especially 'The Sense of an Ending. Those who have read Barnes's historical and philosophical output might appreciate 'Elizabeth Finch' more, however.

Thank you to NetGalley and the publisher for sending me an ARC in exchange for an honest review.

Wow, Julian Barnes: This edgy, challenging, formally experimental novel doesn't exactly aim to be a crowd pleaser, and I respect that. Told as a retrospective, our narrator Neil depicts how he, when he was in his-mid-thirties, attended a class on "Culture and Civilization" that was specifically aimed at grown-ups. His rigorous teacher was the title-giving Elizabeth Finch, with whom he developed an unusual friendship. After her death, Neil inherits her notes, and starts writing...her biography? His autobiography? The biography of Julian the Apostate?

Elizabeth Finch, as Neil describes her, took a Socratic approach to teaching, involving her students in debates, and she deeply believed that Greek and Roman history and culture still influence people living today. Neil calls the distant, composed, discrete teacher whom he then proceeded to meet for regular lunch dates for more than 20 years, a "Romantic Stoic"; much about her life has remained unknown to him, so he sets out to investigate with the help of the notebooks she left behind, her brother Christopher and some other of her former students.

Now that description might make it seem as if Barnes straight up tells us a story, but that would be way too easy and, furthermore, it wouldn't illustrate the point he is trying to make. So Barnes gives us a semi-structured narrative from an, as Neil himself professes, unreliable narrator, intersects it with many, many notes quoted from Elizabeth's notebooks, and then tops it off by turning the whole middle section of the book, a substantive chunk of the novel, into a paper on Julian the Apostate which Neil writes because he had failed to do so back in Finch's class. While Barnes' latest effort, the fantastic The Man in the Red Coat, was a history-heavy ode to past scientific and cultural exchanges between the UK and continental Europe, "Elizabeth Finch" ponders the relationship between ancient history and average people, and how we can learn to think about and grasp the world by trying to understand the people we have lost, be it the famous Julian or the infamous Elizabeth.

"The Man..." required a decent amount of focus to process its content, but "Elizabeth Finch" really pushes the envelope in that area, and I applaud Barnes for that: This celebrated author could just relax and serve some easygoing Klara and the Sun-type of stuff, but no, Julian the literary Apostate Barnes attacks us with philosophy, history, and extravagant structural choices. Elizabeth saw truth in artifice, Neil is a trained actor, and Barnes also knows a thing or two about aesthetics. While Neil's life seems to be mentioned only at the side, there is a sub-story running through the text in which he reflects himself in Elizabeth and emperor Julian, pondering his career, divorces and children. Julian the Apostate, the last pagan emperor of Rome, the man whose death Elizabeth describes as "the moment history went wrong", becomes a foil for both of them. But did the lives of the three of them go wrong? Who is the judge of that?

At the same time, Neil contradicts any easy conclusions his intellectual efforts might suggest: For him "life, much as we would like it to be, does ot amount to a narrative - or not a narrative such as we understand and expect." This is why his book has no clear text form, and the connections between Elizabeth, the historic figure and him are not fully resolved or brought to a conclusion: "Perhaps the fact is that I 'know' and 'understand' Elizabeth Finch no better - if in a different way - than I 'know' and 'understand' the emperor Julian."

Yup, that's complex, but there is also an accessible theme that's easier to grasp, but (as in real life) cannot be fully unpacked: Neil has loved Elizabeth in a multi-faceted manner. Barnes frequently investigates different forms of love, and how he deals with the topic in this novel, also relating to other characters Neil meets or has met, is particularly interesting.

This is a book to be discussed, re-read and dissected, an ambitious work of art that challenges those who dare to pick it up. While I have to admit that I, too, struggled with some sestions, I see what Barnes aims to do here. This 75-year-old literary superstar still surprises readers, there is zero complacency in his texts. I'm already curious what he will come up with next.

Julian Barnes previous 13 literary novels have between them garnered 3 Booker shortlistings and a Booker win (in 2011) – this is his latest novel due to be published in April 2022 and I have to be honest the only of his that I have read that left me disappointed in very large part down to the non-fictional biography at the heart of the novel (both in how it is executed and in my own lack of interest in the subject).

The book can perhaps be best characterised as a layered (auto-)biography – with the narrator Neil giving us details of his own life (two times divorced – the second time shortly before the book begins, a stop start acting career, a kind of drift in life and desire to educate himself) but really fascinated by the book’s titular character – a singular “Romantic-Stoic” (in Neil’s much considered description) who he first encounters in what is ostensibly an adult education course she runs on “Culture and Civilisation” but which ends up, for those who embrace her teaching (with Neil at the centre of this) as more of an intellectual guide to religion, history and philosophy and an invitation to question assumptions.

One of her key tenets seems to be a view of Roman imperial history and its interaction with the rising religion of Christianity which follows in the footsteps of the Enlightenment as well as Edward Gibbon – she is particularly obsessed with Julian the Apostate and the famous quote attributed to him by Swinburne: she instead seeing Julian as a hero whose death fatally altered the flow of human history.

At one point (when rather oddly suggesting her pupils study Hitler) she says:

‘I am suggesting that we familiarise ourselves with those who oppose us and whom we oppose, whether it be a living or a dead figure, whether it be a religious or political opponent, or even a daily newspaper or weekly magazine.

And to be honest this challenge is the only reason I carried on reading the book as I found myself almost entirely disagreeing with the world view expressed by her – a view of history which rather than abandoned truths I would describe as discredited distortions.

Neil and Elizabeth Finch (he only really sees her – even he confesses in his fantasies – as having her full name) strike up a many year friendship meeting for lunch monthly when she puts him through his intellectual paces. After her sudden (to Neil) death he finds she has left him her notes and library – initially unsure what to do with them (other to reproduce some of them in the text – which makes for a slightly oddly aphoristic few pages, he decides to write a short biography of Julian: this forms the middle third of the book and I have to be honest and say I could not engage any real interest in it at all.

The third part of the novel returns to Neil trying to piece together more clues about Elizabeth’s Finch’s life – which does allow for some musing on the difficulty of really knowing another.

I struggled a little with the author’s choice of his own namesake as the base for the book – is he trying to claim some form of mantle for himself as an Apostate or provocative and independent thinker, as the anti-Christian views expressed seem to be both completely dominant in literary fiction and lacking in depth.

Overall this was a novel that I was interested to read but which did not really work for me at all – but will I think for others .

Having been an admirer of Julian Barnes’ work since “Metroland”, a new book by him is always a highlight of my reading year.
Barnes’ latest, “Elizabeth Finch”, is a succinct character study of the eponymous teacher, a kind of slightly more intellectual Miss Jean Brodie, who’s inspiring life and legacy is uncovered by one of her former students, Neil, who narrates the story.
We first meet Elizabeth Finch teaching a course entitled “Culture and Civilisation”, introducing her philosophy on education to a lecture hall of unsuspecting students. “Dead Poets Society” vibes are strong. Barnes vividly brings Elizabeth to life, starting with her clothes; a brogue-wearing, conservatively dressed unmarried woman, not a little iconoclastic. She is the teacher we all wish we’d had in school or university.
Through Neil’s study of Elizabeth’s notebooks, he reveals her passionate defence of rational thinking and desire to challenge society’s monotheistic thinking. The recurring historical figure of Julian the Apostate - the Roman Emperor who rejected Christianity - is revealed as a kind of soulmate or muse to Elizabeth.
“Elizabeth Finch” is as intelligent and well-written a book as one would expect from Julian Barnes, and I enjoyed it immensely. Naturally, Elizabeth Finch dominates the book, sometimes to the detriment of the other characters who don’t seem quite so interesting, but her life story, once explored, is colourful and passionate, making the book an engaging read. It is a rallying cry for independent thinking, with a strong thread about the love of ideas throughout, and one of Julian Barnes’ best books.