Novelist & Essayist
5th Avenue Theatre, April 12, 1999
Biography
Excerpt
Selected Works
Links

Biography
Author of an array of brilliantly diverse novels and a plethora of first-rate journalism, Julian Barnes has garnered international acclaim for his ingenious and wickedly clever works. A writer who likes to take risks, he delivers unpredictable, witty, and inventive prose. Barnes is best known for his unconventional novel Flaubert's Parrot (1984, shortlisted for the Booker Prize), which challenges categorization by being part fiction, part literary criticism, and part biography. From Cross Channel (1996), his whimsical collection of short stories, to the harrowing and satirical novel The History of the World in 10 1/2 Chapters (1989), Barnes's writing is filled with clever and perceptive observations. He notes,"Some people don't like finding ideas in a novel. They react as if they've found a toothpick in a sandwich."

Born in 1946 in Leicester, Barnes was raised in a highly ordered and suburban environment. Both his parents were schoolteachers. He studied Russian and French at school, and later followed his brilliant brother to Oxford. He was prepared to become a barrister: "I took all the exams, but I was getting more pleasure out of doing a round-up of four novels for a provincial paper than I was out of preparing what I might say defending some criminal." Barnes also held a job as a lexicographer for the Oxford English Dictionary, where, he notes, "because I was young and male and quite a lot of the other staff were female and middle-aged, I tended to get the rude words and sports words." After a brief period working as a columnist for a literary magazine, Barnes became deputy literary editor to Martin Amis at the New Statesman. He published his first book, Metroland (1980), at the age of 34. In 1989, Barnes joined The New Yorker as their London correspondent, and in 1995, a selection of his essays on modern Britain, originally written for The New Yorker and Granta, were published as Letters from London (1995).

While his loyalty to his literary agent, Pat Kavanagh (who's also his wife), and to his longtime publisher, Jonathan Cape, attests to his old-fashioned virtues in his personal life, Julian Barnes—the writer—is cunning and experimental. Under the pseudonym Dan Kavanagh, he has written the crime novels Duffy (1980), Fiddle City (1981), and Going to the Dogs (1986), all centering on a bisexual detective named Duffy. Of these projects, Barnes said, "I write them under very different circumstances, and I don't write them on the same typewriter. I go away to write them, to the country, which is ironic, given that they're very urban on the whole."

Excerpt taken from England, England (1998)
At first he had planned simply to buy the Island. Several thousand acres of farmland had been acquired from pension funds and the Church Commissioners in exchange for bonds in his new venture; the next step was to persuade Westminster to sell him sovereignty. It did not seem an improbable idea. The last bits of Empire were currently being disposed of in this – to Sir Jack – entirely rational way. Earlier colonies had departed in a flurry of sudden principle hastened by guerrilla warfare. With the final outposts, sensible economic criteria applied: Gibraltar was sold to Spain, the Falkland Islands to Argentina. Of course, this was not how the handovers were presented, by either vendor or purchaser; but Sir Jack had his sources.

These sources also reported, disappointingly, that Westminster had hardened its position on selling the Isle of Wight to a private individual. Specious objections of national integrity had been adduced. Despite pressure from Sir Jack's loyal group of backbenchers, the Government simply refused to put a price on sovereignty. Not for sale, they said. This had made Sir Jack a little huffy at first, but he soon regained his humour. There was something inherently unsatisfactory about the straight deal, after all. You wanted to buy something, the owner fixed a price, and you eventually got it for less. Where was the fun in that?

Indeed, wasn't there something old-fashioned about the whole concept of ownership, or rather its acquisition by formal contract, in which title is received in exchange for consideration given? Sir Jack preferred to rethink the whole notion. It was certainly true that ownership was irrelevant as long as you had control: and yes, for the moment he had all the land options and planning concessions he needed. He had the banks, the pension funds and the insurance companies onside; his debt-equity ratio was uncontroversial. Naturally, none of his own capital had been ventured, beyond seed-corn level; Sir Jack believed in putting other people's money where his own mouth was. And yet, beyond and beneath all this legitimate buccaneering, there lay a more primal urge, an atavistic yearning to cut through the red tape of contemporary life. It would have been unfair to call Sir Jack Pitman a barbarian, though some did; but there stirred within him a longing to revisit pre-classical, pre-bureaucratic methods of acquiring ownership. Methods such as theft, conquest and pillage, for example.

Selected Works
Metroland (1980)
Under the pseudonym Dan Kavanagh: Duffy (1980)
Under the pseudonym Dan Kavanagh: Fiddle City (1981)
Before She Met Me (1982)
Flaubert's Parrot (1985)
Under the pseudonym Dan Kavanagh: Going to the Dogs (1986)
The History of the World in 10 1/2 Chapters (1989)
Talking It Over (1991)
The Porcupine (1992)
Cross Channel (1996)
England, England (1998)
Love, Etc (2001)

Web Site Links
Barnes's official web site
Salon.com interview with Barnes
New York Times featured author
The Guardian featured author