Departure(s) by Julian Barnes

Published by Knopf on January 20, 2026

Julian Barnes is both the author and narrator of Departure(s). As narrator, Barnes tells us that he was in his mid-seventies during the pandemic. At some point in the story, he says “I’m writing this at the age of seventy-seven, and it is now my generation’s turn to die off.” The author turned 80 this month. It seems clear in the novel’s early pages that Barnes has cast himself as the narrator (he thinks about wearing a badge that says BUT I WON THE BOOKER PRIZE when he visits the hospital so that exhausted doctors, choosing which patients to treat and which to let die, will put him the “treat” column), but authors often give their doppelganger characters a different name. When a character later addresses the narrator as Mr. Barnes, all doubt about the narrator’s identity disappears.

As people get older, it’s natural for them to think about death. As novelists get older, they naturally write about death. It seems death is on Barnes’ mind when he proclaims, early in the story, “This will be my last book.” Barnes later reveals that he is living with (but probably won’t die of) a rare blood cancer. He notes that he has “had a lifelong engagement with death, both theoretical and actual, and have written about it many times.” Near the novel’s conclusion, he repeats that “this will definitely be my last book — my social departure, my final conversation with you.” He sounds like a man saying goodbye to literary life, if not to life itself. By assuring that he will not die in the middle of writing his last novel, Barnes is “denying agency to death.”

Barnes connects memory to death when he writes: “I have found myself thinking a lot in recent years about how we remember the dead, about how quickly memory becomes myth and once-living people are turned into a set of anecdotes (but how could it be otherwise?).” The novel touches on his memories of dead friends, as well as his uncertainty that his selective memories of them are accurate.

Barnes tells us that the novel will tell a story, or a story-within-the-story, but “not just yet.” First, he discusses involuntary autobiographical memories (IAMs). The phenomenon was displayed by a man who, after having a stroke, tasted a pie and remembered — in order — every pie he had ever eaten. This is not quite like Proust’s famous madeleine that, when dunked in tea, set Marcel on a long journey of remembrance, because that journey was “a very leisurely, semi-voluntary, semi-automatic memory.”

Barnes is not flooded with memories (he imagines it would be a disagreeable experience, although he would be willing to try it), but he devotes careful thought to the nature of memory (“memory is identity”), including the inability to control memories, and particularly the tendency toward forgetfulness that accompanies old age. He suggests, with considerable merit, that the fullness of memory might be dreadful: “If humankind cannot bear very much reality, I suspect it also cannot bear too much knowledge about itself.”

The middle of the story begins with the question, “How to tell a story with a missing middle?” It focuses on his promise not to write about his friends Stephen and Jean, who became a couple after Barnes introduced them, then broke up and reunited forty years later, after Stephen conspired with Barnes to orchestrate a chance meeting. Julian writes that, at their wedding, his own unsuccessful sexual encounter with Jean “burst into my head with all the force of an involuntary autobiographical memory as I was double-checking that I had the ring safely in my pocket.”

Of course, Barnes breaks his promise by making Stephen and Jean characters in the story, but only after they die. They supply the “story within a story” that Barnes promised. It is both a love story and the story of a failed relationship. Jean complains that Stephen loves her too much or expresses his love in ways that annoy her — he drew her a bath after reading in the newspaper that women regard bath-drawing as the most romantic thing a man can do — while Stephen can’t understand why Jean would be upset that he loves her so much. Jean tells Barnes, ‘Love, in reality, Mr Novelist, isn’t how you and your breed depict it,” a comment that inspires Barnes to write about them, if only to create the kind of novel she seems to desire. Ultimately, Departure(s) is about the familiar topics of love and death (and the death of love) as experienced in memory.

Barnes discusses literature and name-drops without savaging his contemporaries, including Philip Larkin’s “Poetry of Departure,” John Updike’s writing about “flight and dreams of leaving,” Ismail Kadare’s death without winning the Nobel Prize, and Martin Amis’ refusal to continue treating his throat cancer (a choice also made by “another member of our band, Christopher Hitchens”). He also offers insight into less contemporary literary figures, from Proust to Baudelaire, from T.S. Eliot to Shakespeare. All of this is interesting to readers of contemporary fiction, although I was more taken with his discussion of a dog who, like dogs in general, doesn’t realize he’s a dog. Nor does the dog know that he will eventually die, allowing him to live in the moment without fear of the future or the torment of memory, a trick that mere humans have not mastered.

In one discussion of death, Barnes talks about the common perception that it is unfair for good people to acquire cancer while bad people live into old age — a perception that “comes, most probably, from a residue (or even a fullness) of religious belief.” He is moved by the innocence and puzzlement of people who experience that anguish, “but we have surely lived enough millennia on this planet to have noticed that life is not fair or just, and that bad things often happen to good people, and good things sometimes happen to bad people, and that sudden chaos lurks constantly beneath each placid surface.” That’s just the way life is, which might serve as an alternate title for the novel. And while he sometimes rages about death, he is comforted by the phrase “It’s just the universe doing its stuff” because ultimately, that’s all it is. One of his final points — “life is not a tragedy with a happy ending, despite what religion promises; rather, it is a farce with a tragic ending, or, at best, a light comedy with a sad ending” — is a bleak but honest assessment of the cycle of life and death.

Barnes writes about the elusive nature of happiness (“It may be that we each mean different things when we speak of love and happiness, within a couple, as well as within society”). He might be seen as fatalistic, or fatalism might be another word for acceptance of reality. He no longer believes that great art will endure. “Either we shall blow up the planet, and all art with it, or else we shall survive but evolve into something we cannot even imagine– but nothing like what we are now, with our simple longings for god and love and happiness and art. We shall develop into some life form as distant from us as we are from an amoeba.”

Departure(s) often reads more like a long essay than a novel, but a Booker winner has probably earned the right to write his last novel as he pleases. Like it or not (mostly not), we’re all going to die. Barnes made a difference, probably in many ways, but certainly as a novelist. His final book is part of a legacy that few can match. In the end, he looks back on his life and realizes it wasn’t so bad. That’s probably all that any of us can hope for.

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