Elizabeth Finch by Julian Barnes

Published by Knopf on August 16, 2022

Elizabeth Finch could be read as a celebration of intellect. That, at least, is my less than intellectual impression of the novel. The central theme of the unconventional narrative concerns ideas — following an idea, exploring it, evaluating it, and drawing conclusions about the idea’s merit. The novel takes a close look at several ideas that relate to the meaning of life. To some extent, the novel might also be seen as the celebration of teachers, or of the rare teacher who opens the minds of students rather than stuffing minds full of facts that might or might not be accurate.

The story is told in three parts. Elizabeth Finch is the glue that binds them. When the story opens, EF is teaching a course in Culture and Civilization at the University of London. The course touches upon monoculture and foundation myths, the deception of histories that cultures embrace as “comforting bedtime stories.” EF deals in “truths not from previous generations but from previous eras, truths she kept alive but which others had abandoned.” Students like Neil and Anna find their lives transformed.

EF challenges her students, poses questions and critiques answers without moral judgment or derision. EF does not teach in the traditional way — dates, names, facts, “all leading to broader ideas.” She begins with the broad ideas, and then illustrates them with dates, names, and facts. Students who are unsettled by ideas, who are unwilling to rethink their own ideas, who just want to memorize facts and dates so they can pass exams, drop her class or become confrontational. One of the confrontational students, Geoff, provides a different perspective on EF at the novel’s end. Which view of EF is correct (or maybe both or neither) is left for the reader to decide.

In any event, we learn in part three that EF published a piece after she retired that caused the tabloids to paint her as a heretic, anti-Christian, and a disciple of Hitler. Geoff may have been the instigator of that attack. EF was reclusive before the tabloids attacked her and stopped publishing after, but she never published much anyway, apparently preferring solitude and a life of the mind to sharing with others. As with so much else in her life, it may be that she just didn’t want to be bothered.

EF is an enigma. She is sympathetic but distant. She answers questions with candor and concealment. She speaks of love as bringing clarity and delirium. She resists having labels stuck to her because she is “not a steamer trunk.” Apart from these contradictions, we learn very little about EF because the novel’s narrator, Neil, never uncovers her secrets.

If we can be sure about anything, it is that EF is is a stoic who believes that freedom lies in controlling what you can and accepting the things you cannot. We might be able to control what we think or feel but we cannot control how others will behave in a relationship. EF once cautioned her students that passion, like reason, “may mislead us furiously.” Neil once glimpsed a man who might have been important to EF, his best clue that passion might have influenced her life, but he struggles to learn more.

Neil views EF as a romantic pessimist and then as a romantic stoic. EF tells Anna that love is the only thing that matters. Yet EF believes that love, for a woman, has always meant “possession followed by sacrifice” — being possessed and then being sacrificed. She knows that people will look at her and say she never married, “a reductive way to describe and contain a life.” EF is solitary but not lonely because solitude is strength and loneliness is weakness. EF abhors weakness and will never be possessed.

After Neil is no longer EF’s student, he begins meeting her for lunch two or three times a year. They continue their meetings for twenty years, through two of Neil’s failed marriages. The lunches always begin with EF asking, “What have you got for me?” They spend the lunch discussing ideas, often ideas that EF touched upon in her class. EF never talks about herself because, to EF, ideas are the things that matter. Everything else, including the food served at lunch, is likely to be disappointing.

The novel’s second part is an essay. Neil writes it in response to an implied challenge, a way to prove something to EF despite his knowledge that EF will never read it. The essay is astonishing. It explores Julian the Apostate, “the last pagan emperor of Rome,” whose death made possible the rise of Christianity (or at least that’s how Christian history tells the story). The essay recounts the deeds and words of Julian, imagines how history might have unfolded if he had lived (perhaps the Age of Reason would not have been delayed by fourteen centuries), and examines how thinkers and poets through the ages viewed Julian, including Montaigne, Milton, Voltaire, Gibbon, Goethe, Byron, and Swinburne. This is heavy thought, but the essay is lively, never stuffy or dense. This is how history and philosophy should be written, with all the rigor but none of the drudgery of scholarship.

The third part reconnects Neil and Anna (and Geoff by email) as Neil continues his quest to understand EF. EF’s brother, who could not be less like her, contributes his limited perspective. Neil and Anna both admire (and even love) EF but in different ways, while Goeff thinks she’s a bit of a fraud. Yet as EF made clear, none of us can really understand another person. Our best hope is to understand something of ourselves, a hope that comes from taking control of those things that we can control about our lives and stoically accepting the things we cannot. That’s probably the novel’s great lesson (giving intellectual force to the AA serenity prayer), although the book overflows with lessons.

I have never read a novel like Elizabeth Finch, a novel that is largely devoted to an essay about history, religion, and philosophy, a novel in which thought supplants action or characterization. We learn only superficial details about Neil and his failed marriages because Neil isn’t important. We learn almost nothing about Anna. None of the characters, not even EF, are as important as ideas. Yet the essay is so brilliant and the unknowable character of EF so fascinating that the novel’s unconventional nature, its refusal to give the reader a plot or detailed characterizations, becomes a virtue. This isn’t a novel for every reader, but it may be a novel that would reward every reader who gives it a fair chance.

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