Dec 22, 2015 09:02 PM
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Uxoriousness is a theme repeatedly visited by the author in Levels of Life, novelist Julian Barnes' latest offering. There is the balloonist and photographer Nadar, who despite his many infidelities, or rather despite them, is so devoted to his wife that he dies of the heartbreak of her loss to mortality. Colonel Fred Burnaby falls irredeemably in love with the actress Sarah Bernhardt, and even though technically it does not constitute uxorious love(she rejects his marriage proposal), there is little doubt that she occupies an uxorious space in his heart.
Then there is the writer himself, whose grief knows no bounds when his wife of three decades, the literary agent Pat Kavanagh, dies of a brain tumour. The book, just like the author's previous one, is dedicated to Pat, and as far as dedications go, one of a quality higher than this cannot be hoped for.
Mr Barnes has a reputation for defying genre-boundaries. In his interviews, he frequently talks about the vital role of form in conveying an idea. In Levels of Life, he has managed to hit the sweet spot. Even though it does not fall into any of the established literary forms, the book follows a structure that seems to be tailor-made for the author's purposes. The book jacket puts it under biography/memoir, but it appears to be merely a logistical exercise in categorization. In truth, it is part-memoir, part-history, part-meditative essay, part-creative non fiction; and this just covers some of the ground Levels of Life treads on.
The book is deceptive; the density of emotion it packs in a slim volume finds its competition only in the author's own Booker-winning The Sense of an Ending. It is best read slowly and broodingly. It begs the reader to devote as much time as one would to a book thrice as lengthy. And it provides as much satisfaction as can be derived from any other modern masterpiece. When one says that this is probably the most emotional work by an author who has already been called an unparalleled magus of the heart, it's really saying something.
The book works on different levels. For one thing, it works as history: communal as well as personal. The individual lives explored(those of Burnaby, Sarah and Nadar) do not lend themselves easily to merely the erection of a monolithic history of amateur ballooning and human flight. Their stories are told, first and foremost, for their own sake. But they do follow thematic patterns, and the author's biggest achievement is perhaps the fact that the themes do not appear to be externally imposed. So, it also works as narrative non-fiction, largely since the motifs seem to run organically across the narrative. All the three chapters begin with variations on the same idea: the idea of putting together two things that haven't been put together before. The chapters explore not just the mathematical possibilities that arise out of the scenario, but also emotional possibilities. And therefore, it works on the level of a contemplative essay as well.
Life, when described in art, is usually treated as a linear entity that runs almost on a Cartesian plane. Barnes gives it the vertical levels required to make it the three-dimensional thing that it ought to be treated as. This is also the book's achievement. It makes it possible to tell the entire human story through a particular one, and Barnes does it with aplomb. One individual, an adventurer named Felix Tournachon(aka Nadar), hops into a hot-air balloon with photography equipment, and takes pictures sitting on the clouds. It gives us a new mirror, a new way of looking at ourselves. The photographs don't survive, some of them don't even develop, but the world is irreversibly changed. The change is not immediately discernible but there is change nonetheless. There had to be change. Because after all, Ballooning and Photography had never been put together before, and now they had.
It's interesting to think about the consequences of that. Hasn't it made us aware of our littleness? Think about that most beautiful of photographs, perhaps of all time; the one that is referred to, in popular parlance, as Earth-Rise. The shining blue rising above the horizons of a gray, desolate moon. Doesn't it make us appreciate what we have? Think of the pictures of the pale blue dot taken by the spacecrafts cruising through the outer reaches of our solar system. Hasn't it imbibed in us a sense of existential and epistemological modesty, an awareness of our irrelevance in the universe's scheme of things? Think of the arrogance of man, and how high it would have been in the absence of such a sobering reflection of ourselves. Think of all the myths it has dispelled. Think of the enlightenment it has brought to us. Think of that one little event, of two things coming together, and of that one inconsequential adventurer, and then think of the world irreversibly changed in their wake. And this is only the first chapter of the book.
The second chapter is about Burnaby and Sarah. How perfect a metaphor for love is ballooning! Doesn't it feel like to the one in the throes of love as if one were weightlessly hovering across the skies? Barnes isn't content with using this near-tired metaphor. He gets into the technicalities involved in ballooning and uses them as metaphors for the little elements that constitute love. And he does it with the robustness of a scientist performing a meticulous experiment. The two protagonists paint very different portraits of themselves even though they are both essentially adventurous souls. It's an interesting contradiction they play out: the idea of settling down together is at once familiar and strange. Sarah sees it as a denial of her bohemian spirit, while Burnaby sees it as a reinforcement of his. It's a paradox that cannot be resolved. It ends, rather expectedly I might add, in tragedy. But it is not without its high moments. Nevertheless, it also constitutes the weakest part of the book. It gets cheesy at times, especially the conversations between the lovers. It could partly be because it's a fictionalized reconstruction, but the fact that the author manages to lift it from the mush, however occasionally, is a testament to his craft.
The third and final chapter, entitled The Loss of Depth is the engine that drives the book. It's the dark heart at the core of everything. Although Pat is never referenced by name, she is the familiar ghost that haunts the book. Even while reading the first two chapter, one feels her presence. Barnes mourns her unabashedly here, but without being self-indulgent. He dissects his agony with clinical rigor, studies it, mulls over it. He looks at it from a distance, views it from above like one would while taking a bird's-eye photograph. He treads the line between dispassion and indulgence with precision. In the entire history of memoirs, one might be tempted to say, there probably isn't a better example of a cerebral examination of personal grief. He leaves nothing unquestioned. The comforting words of friends and fellow-mourners, the conventional wisdom about personal loss, the things a widower is expected to do: everything is put under the lens.
At one point, Barnes contemplates suicide, not as a way of dealing with his grief, but as the natural thing to do after Pat is gone. He has previously explored the matter of suicide in The Sense of an Ending. He is in the same philosophical mode here too. One is reminded of what Camus had said about suicide: There is but one truly serious philosophical problem and that is suicide. But then Barnes fights the thought off, not for his sake but for Pat's. He sees himself as her rememberer-in-chief: "insofar as she was alive at all, she was alive in my memory". He stumbles upon the utility of self-deception, just as most mourners do. And just as he questions everything, so he tries every method there is of dealing with widowhood. His attempts are sincere, as is his writing earnest. How someone can be so sad and so objectively brilliant at the same time is a minor miracle in itself.
Julain Barnes doesn't let go of a metaphor, an allusion, a reference or any other literary device, until he has fully exhausted his potential. He marshals to his service all the metaphors that he has used in the first two chapters, and does so that they seem organically indispensable to the narrative. It all seems to converge into a beautiful, albeit traumatic, denouement.
There is education on offer here. It promises to be therapeutic to the grieving, and it keeps that promise. It isn't hard to imagine how cathartic it must have been to the writer himself. He has taken more than half a decade to distill the pain into something wholesome, cohesive and lasting. But, even if it provided no comfort whatsoever to the writer, it deserved to be written. It begged to be written. It is probably for this reason, more than any other, it deserves to be read by all.
