Julian Barnes’s​ latest book is full of broken rules. In the second chapter we’re invited to look back at his early novel Flaubert’s Parrot (1984), which contained, along with much else, ‘a list … of subjects which should be banned from fiction on a temporary or permanent basis’. The narrator’s list, with which Barnes himself ‘largely agreed’, included ‘a twenty-year ban on novels set in Oxford or Cambridge, and a ten-year ban on other university fiction’. It also flagged ‘novels about incest’, ‘novels set in abattoirs’, ‘fiction set in South America’ (‘the intention is to curb the spread of package-tour baroque and heavy irony’). Barnes added: ‘There shall be a twenty-year ban on God; or rather, on the allegorical, metaphorical, allusive, offstage, imprecise and ambiguous uses of God.’

We may wonder what sort of reservation hides in the large rather than small agreement. It seems likely that Barnes himself was not tempted by most of these literary sins, which would be banned for the good of literature. (The sin involving Oxford or Cambridge is different.) It’s true, as he says in Departure(s), that the ban expired in 2004, but he now informs us that ‘without telling anyone’, he ‘renewed it for another twenty years’.

The next paragraph begins: ‘Anyway, I studied at Oxford between 1964 and 1968,’ and what he calls ‘a story within the story’ opens. This concerns certain moments in the life of Stephen and Jean, two of Barnes’s friends at Oxford. It’s ‘a true story’, he says, ‘though it comes with several caveats’. One is that Stephen and Jean are not the names of the historical persons. Another is that fiction ‘requires the slow composting of life before it becomes usable material’. He goes on: ‘I have no notion at the time what might or might not break down into fictionable possibility.’ This is not the death of the author, just a model of his canny elusiveness.

Stephen and Jean almost got married around the time of their graduation but decided against it at the last minute, saying they had ‘reached the point where we either marry or split’. Barnes thought it was ‘an extraordinary coincidence’ that they should separately use the same phrase when they told him, but then ‘realised it must have been a form of words agreed between the two of them, a diplomatic communiqué, a telegram from that insincere world the rest of us were about to enter’.

A few pages into the book the narrator says there are ‘two things to mention at this stage’:

1) There will be a story – or a story within the story – but not just yet; and

2) This will be my last book.

Who is making this announcement? Where are we? By the end of Departure(s) the narrator has become a chatty old friend who signs off as ‘Julian Barnes, London, 2022-25’. He has told us again that ‘this will definitely be my last book.’ Of course, that name is on the dust jacket too, but is this the same person? We could follow our narrator’s advice and avoid any ‘rush towards certainty’. As for us, we are imaginatively in the London of the mentioned dates, and literally wherever we like to do our reading. We need to think of both locations because throughout the book – let’s call it a novel for the moment – the narrator behaves as if we were in the same room with him or reading the text as he writes it. If we don’t want to call it a novel, we might think of it as a printed conversation in which only one person talks.

Barnes uses phrases like ‘as I said’, asks rhetorical questions of the reader, evokes his own novels (A History of the World in 10½ Chapters as well as Flaubert’s Parrot), tells us about (and quotes from) his diary and drafts. He says: ‘you may have noted’; ‘did I tell you’; ‘the other day’; ‘do you know what I mean?’ When he condescends to Jean, he adds that ‘fair-mindedness [was] leaking from every pore.’ When he leaves us at the end of the book, he says: ‘I shall “miss” “you”.’ He also tells us clearly at this point who we are. We have been his audience all along, but here, as we turn to the last page, we are specifically his readers, of this and other books. ‘I hope you’ve enjoyed our relationship over the years. I certainly have. Your presence has delighted me – indeed I would be nothing without you.’ An exaggeration, but he is trying to flatter us.

The narrator’s personal tale chiefly concerns the diagnosis of terminal cancer. ‘It isn’t curable,’ a doctor tells him, ‘but it is manageable.’ This is the central topic of the third of five chapters, and for obvious reasons it is also everywhere else. The first chapter is an essay on science and memory; the last chapter is a survey of where we are – its title is ‘Going Nowhere’. Chapters Two and Four provide our ‘story within the story’, that of Stephen and Jean.

In spite of Barnes’s brilliant narrative games – demonstrations of when fiction is to be preferred to truth, boring sections that are carefully crafted as boring – the book focuses on one double topic: memory and dying. There is a long, lyrical analysis in the final chapter:

We all know that memory is identity; take away memory and what do we have? Merely some kind of animal existence in the moment … It seems to me that humans are so often busy living that they forget they are human – or at least forget what it is to be human, and what its consequences are – and therefore what it means to be dead.

In the opening pages Barnes informs us that he is in his mid-seventies. He keeps time later too, mentioning the ages of 77 and 78. On this first occasion he has just heard of an amazing medical occurrence. A 45-year-old man, suffering from ‘a left posterothalamic haemorrhagic stroke’, has discovered that ‘tasting apple pie would trigger memories of all the pies he had ever tasted; they would be experienced in proper chronology and would rush into his mind like a cascade.’

Barnes reports two personal reactions to this news. First, alarm: a sort of terror at the thought of ‘high-speed assaults by forgotten memories … tearing up your very sense of yourself’. What would we do if our brains contained ‘a chronological listing’ of our ‘moral actions and inactions’? How would we face ‘the chronological record’ of all our ‘lies, hypocrisies, cruelties’, our ‘harsh forgettings’, ‘broken promises, infidelities of word and deed’? And then Barnes turns to something ‘more writerly’, a sense that this kind of memory magic, if it could be reproduced, might help the autobiographer.

The text quickly moves back to worry. Should we be thinking of our brains as ‘supercomputers’? ‘We need to know stuff, and the brain tells us what it is, faster than Google.’ This ‘may be the wrong model. It still gives us too much agency. It still makes us imagine that we are in charge of our brains, and of what we want from them.’ Our choice in the future, Barnes seems to be suggesting, may well be between forgetting everything and remembering too much. There probably isn’t a middle ground, but we can try.

In Chapter 2 Barnes returns to the topic of memory and describes his academic career with customary irony. He studied French and Russian at Oxford, decided that languages were not ‘serious enough’, switched to philosophy and psychology, which he found ‘rather too “serious”’, and so went back to French. A couple of pages later, he remembers that ‘this isn’t about me,’ and returns to Stephen and Jean.

By Chapter 4, the old friends have got together again, and thanks to Barnes’s genial assistance they have married. Barnes becomes witness to some extraordinary psychological shifts, especially on Jean’s part. She tells him: ‘You can’t imagine how oppressive it can be having someone in love with you all the time,’ and perhaps Barnes can’t imagine this at first. But he can imagine something because two pages later he says: ‘It was at that point, I think, that I decided to break my promise not to write about Stephen and Jean.’ As readers we may find Jean’s phrase intuitively correct. It could be oppressive to be married to anyone who does almost anything ‘all the time’. Jean has another wonderfully gnomic line: ‘Happiness doesn’t make me happy.’ Because happiness is always someone else’s idea? Because happiness won’t stay, even for happy people? Barnes has some thoughts on the matter: ‘Neither happiness nor misery are controllable … If everyone around you agrees they are happy, perhaps you are too, because there are no real tests for happiness.’

In this context, Barnes’s sudden confession is surprising. ‘I felt guilt,’ he says, about the fact that ‘Stephen and Jean now departed from one another for a second time’:

I felt guilt, and also a sense of failure. I had brought them together the first time in the caff, and then again the second time, in the same place, with the same ultimate result … I thought I was wise, just because I’d written so many books; I thought I knew what made people tick; I even thought of myself as an advice centre. But I had treated Stephen and Jean as if they were characters in one of my novels.

They are characters in one of his novels, but we know what he means. The novelist, more than anyone, should take care not to inflict his own sentimental romances on people he hasn’t invented. Even if Barnes can’t track the arrival of fictional possibility he knows when a novelist has been overmanaging the facts.

In the central chapter​ we get a full medical memo, another true story. Barnes describes the early days of his cancer treatment:

I have had a lifelong engagement with death, both theoretical and actual, and have written about it many times. Yet … I hadn’t received a death sentence. Instead, I had received a life sentence: sentenced to live with my cancer until I died … In those first months, I had a dozen or so pints of blood drained out of me … Gradually my numbers came down.

He tells us that he wrote the above from memory, ‘or rather what a combination of original memory plus constant retelling had turned it into. And it’s not untrue.’ But when he goes back to the notes he made in hospital, he realises he has ‘forgotten or eliminated’ certain details. At the time, he had written: ‘Oh dear – this may be end of story – I was hoping for something worth recording without being fatal.’ In retrospect, this seems ‘like a serious temptation of the gods’. When he began working on Departure(s), he gave it the title ‘Jules Was’, which he now finds ‘provisionally awful and archly self-pitying’.

We are beginning to see what Barnes wants (and doesn’t want) for this book. He has a wonderful throwaway characterisation of his diary: ‘It is, like all diaries, fully partial.’ And there is a modest precision about the following distinction: ‘While I am occasionally self-pitying, I am never competitive about illness.’ A little earlier in his draft he had written:

It’s not the sort of cancer that I can feel responsible for, and therefore guilty about. Oh, if only I hadn’t smoked/drunk so much/eaten so much ultra-processed food … it’s a cancer caused by the body getting old, starting to break down, and turn against its own best interests. It’s a cancer rooted in the universe’s utter indifference. It’s random, it has no significance – it’s just the universe doing its stuff. Don’t insert morality or purpose into its unrolling and dénouement.

In Chapter 4 there is a brilliant comic sequence about Barnes’s promise not to write about Stephen and Jean. When Jean asked him to swear on a Bible that he wouldn’t, he ‘thought she was joking’. He then wonders how he is going to hold the Bible, or rather he says he did. ‘No, I didn’t really think any of those things, it’s just the absurdity of the situation tempts me to misremember, or rather, invent.’ We are introduced to Jean’s dog (later Barnes’s dog) Jimmy. Barnes says he doesn’t ‘want to go on about Jimmy’, but then, characteristically, goes on about him for the rest of the book.

In the last chapter Barnes tells us about an interviewer who asks him if he is ‘raging against the dying of the light’. He decides to ‘murmur non-committally’ in response, but over the page he is less reticent. ‘While I still hate and fear death (though recognising the pointlessness of such protests), do I rage against it? I’m not sure I ever did – I think I tried to wail lucidly against it.’ And when the time comes, he adds: ‘I hope there will be little raging.’ In a more ironic mode he tells us: ‘I myself am not planning any last words, famous or unfamous; but who knows what might stalk into or out of my brain when I realise that my days are over.’ Among his last epigrams is this gentle insight: ‘I don’t think it’s the arrival of ripeness that makes me philosophical; rather its opposite, an acknowledgment of decay.’

The notion of disappearance arises in three of the book’s five chapters, as well as in its title. Barnes could have called this work ‘Disappearance’ or ‘Disappearances’, but he didn’t. The implication of the bracket in Departure(s) is that we should not concentrate on multiple events unless we are ready to mix them up and throw them away. The instances of the word in the novel are ‘death and departure’; ‘an arrival from which there will be no further departure’; ‘now departed from one another for a second time’; and ‘departure habitually leads to arrival.’ The occasion for three of these images is death to come, a final journey to nowhere. But the possibility of a parallel, of speaking in the same breath (or reading in the same book) about return and no return, about death and mere divorce, reminds us that words are where we live. They talk back to us and sometimes prosecute us. So that a writer, for example, might think the worst possible thing he could do to his friends would be to treat them as characters in a novel.