Neil is just one of many who fell under her spell during his time in her class. ‘I’ll remember Elizabeth Finch when most other characters I’ve met this year have faded’ The TimesĮlizabeth Finch was a teacher, a thinker, an inspiration.
She will change the way you see the world. This is a novel that rejects the rigid convictions of cultural polemics while constructing a qualified but resolute polemic of its own.The Sunday Times Bestseller from the Winner of the Booker Prize A book that is, among its many layered identities, a manifesto. The novel is in part a fierce defence of the intellectual values that have directed the course of Barnes’s writing from the first. Alongside the characteristically self-deprecating tone of Neil’s hesitant ruminations stands something more steely. Yet it would be a mistake to think that Barnes is simply repeating old tricks in Elizabeth Finch. The story turns on a long relationship, which changes through the decades it focuses on moments of evocative return.
Several features of this novel are located in recognizably Barnesian territory. His elusive example, intertwined with the lives of Neil and his fellow students, leads the reader from a personal narrative to the broader framework of history. A third character, embedded in the ambiguities of textual record and legend, becomes prominent in the narrative: Julian the Apostate, the philosophical Roman emperor. It is the story of Elizabeth Finch, the enigmatic woman who delivered the course. But, as Neil often tells us, 'this is not my story'.
The story of Neil’s life – his only story – turns on his experience of a year-long course for mature students on 'Culture and Civilization' that he once took, and its enduring legacy through years of reflection. More concerned with the ambiguity of ideas than with clarity of plot or character, it is a heartfelt celebration of the life of the mind – though its defiance is qualified by the wryness we would expect from Julian Barnes. This uncompromising novel denies its readers many of the pleasures of fiction.
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