Julian Barnes on god, the universe and chicken killing machines

Jun 11 2008 by Laura Davis, Liverpool Daily Post

A conference at Hope University will debate the work of author Julian Barnes. He talks to Laura Davis about God, the universe and chicken killing machines

TIME was that even the most civilised dinner party could turn into pistols at dawn at the briefest entry into one of the three conversational war zones – politics, money and religion.

These days – when the P in Party stands for Peas in a Pod, there are internet sites that tell you what your friends paid for their houses and more people worship the cult of celebrity than actively follow the faith they were born into – there are few taboo subjects left.

There is one, however, that is guaranteed to make your guests squirm in their seats or smile far too brightly and change the subject back to little Jack’s school play. It is the one surety in life and the one thing most of us avoid thinking about – death.

Booker Prize nominated author Julian Barnes is in the minority. He thinks about death “at least once every waking day” and sometimes raises the subject with a friend whose consciousness is more regularly gate-crashed by mortality (Barnes’s own expression).

In his latest book, Nothing to be Frightened of, he describes this obsession as “like being in a hotel room, where the alarm clock has been left on the previous occupant’s setting”.

“It’s not something you bring up in conversation so it needs someone to write as I do, to come out into the open. It’s not acceptable, when the conversation about Gordon Brown runs out, to say ‘what about talking about death?’,” says Barnes, who is visiting Liverpool Hope University on Saturday to appear at a conference about his work.

“I think we are not good at death in this country. We are not good at talking about it.

“People are more willing to talk about dying than the fact of death. I wouldn’t mind dying if I didn’t end up dead at the end of it.”

In the old days, he adds, religion used to do the talking for us, and provided a solution in the form of an afterlife.

Barnes’s faith, or rather his lack of it, is also a central theme in Nothing to be Frightened of. He describes himself as “agnostic going on atheist”.

“As a writer, I would see we made up the Bible as a very good novel which then got corrupted by power systems. It’s a wonderful story in the great tradition of Hollywood, a great tragedy with a happy ending. It’s not such a good story if you die and don’t go to heaven.”

In the opening line of the book, which is not, he insists, an autobiography, Barnes says: “I don’t believe in God, but I miss Him.”

His brother, Jonathan Barnes, the noted Aristotle scholar, responded with “Soppy”.

This exchange between the two brothers, and between Barnes and his friends and other members of his family, is the most intriguing element of Nothing to be Frightened of.

While writing the book, which is – as its author points out – more a discussion of different themes than the story of his life, he returned to conversations that had intrigued him and contacted the people involved to ask for clarification of certain details.

Reading these exchanges feels deliciously voyeuristic, just as reliving past conversations must have – spying on your earlier self; questioning your younger self’s response to what was discussed and asking friends: “What did you mean by that?”

“It’s partly a memoir, partly an essay, partly about God, death, art, memory and what happens when memories conflict,” says Barnes, who was born in Leicester in 1946 and now lives in London.

“I include conversations with my brother about how we remember things in our childhood differently. It’s quite clear that one or both of us is wrong.”

They have conflicting memories of a green metal machine, screwed to the door jamb of their Grandpa’s garden shed.

He used it to kill chickens, Julian recalls, wringing its neck while he stroked it into calmness and held tightly to its convulsing body. Jonathan however, believes it was a junior guillotine: “I have a clear picture of a small basket underneath the blade . . . Grandpa putting the headless bird on the ground, its running around for a few moments.” Both recollections are vivid, yet, as Barnes points out: “The only way we could both be right was if our grandfather had two different killing machines.”

Other accounts are more sentimental, such as a description of the first time the author opened his mother’s handbag – before her death it had been sacred ground, but now there was the job of sorting through her belongings.

In it, he found a cutting listing the 25 greatest post-war English batsmen from a newspaper she never read and a photograph of their childhood dog. Barnes states that the house clearing “turned into an exhumation of what we had been as a family”.

As the writer is in a reflective mood, the conference on his work at Hope has come at the right time.

He is used to his books being on A-Level English syllabuses and being debated by university students, and was even once the subject of a Mastermind round (they asked him to write the questions), but this is quite a different experience.

“I’m not going to sit through every session, because I don’t want to know what people think about me in that sense. It’s just that some writers would like to sit through long discussions about their work but it would make me too self-conscious, which is something you’ve got to avoid as a writer,” he says.

Another thing to evade is re-reading his own books, because by the time they have been published he feels he knows them too well to enjoy.

He does re-read other people’s novels, however, and takes inspiration from them when writing his own – the Booker Prize-shortlisted Flaubert’s Parrot is about the way an English doctor uses Flaubert’s writings to make sense of his own life; Arthur and George was based on the true story of how Sir Arthur Conan Doyle helped a George Edalji, a Birmingham solicitor falsely accused of a gruesome crime.

Barnes still uses an electric typewriter, despite owning a computer “just for emails”. He demands no other conditions for writing except: “Silence helps, if your imagination is at work and you’re living within your head. Ten years ago, the great bane of my life was the telephone because all business was done on it, but since everything has started to be done by email it has got easier to achieve.”

He laughs, adding: “It was my own fault because every time the phone rang I would have to go and answer it to see if anything interesting was going on.”

* NOTHING to be Frightened of, by Julian Barnes, is published by Jonathan Cape, Random House, and is in shops now, priced £16.99.

lauradavis@dailypost.co.uk

Excerpt from Nothing to be Frightened of >>>