Perhaps disappointment had made him delay his return longer than usual, for as he glanced up the Channel to the east he saw the sun begin to rise. He crossed the French coast at 18,000 feet. Inside the cockpit, red light from the instrument panel fell softly on Prosser’s hands and face he glowed like an avenger. His Hurricane 11B was black in its camouflage paint. On a calm, black night in June, 1941, Sergeant-Pilot Thomas Prosser was poaching over Northern France. If Barnes’s power-supply had failed, or even faltered, on this opening page, his whole enterprise would have been seriously imperilled: At any rate, this is the author’s stratagem, and it’s a bold one. The book opens brilliantly – that is to say, with an image so powerfully lit that it will haunt us for the book’s duration. She spends a lifetime asking questions and receiving answers both sound and unsound: in her antiquity, however, we find her knowing plenty and yet still relishing the invincibility of certain riddles and metaphors that had stuck – ‘like burrs’ – to her imagination when she was a child. The trouble was, how could you know what questions to ask? It seemed to her that you were in a position to ask a really correct question only if you already knew the answer, and what was the point of that?’ The victim here is Jean Serjeant, the book’s biographee, whose life we follow from her childhood in the early Thirties to her very old old age in 2021. There are three hundred question-marks in Staring at the Sun – that’s about one-and-a-half of the little worriers per page: ‘. These are the circles that Barnes’s people tend to move in, round and round, and never before more nakedly than in this latest book. But is it not also an affliction, a disabling distancer-from-life? Wishing to grasp the essence of a genius like Flaubert: doesn’t this also mean we’d like to cut him down to size? Is there not more vanity involved in putting a ‘good question’ than there can ever be in providing a sound answer? And if there is a sound answer, can the question really have been all that good?
Asking questions is supposed to be a ‘good thing’, to do with being neither fooled nor squashed. He shows us Intelligence in overdrive, but he also requires us to wonder if it’s chosen the right road. In this sense, Barnes both celebrates and mocks the powers of reason. Usually, they know, or think they know, most of the answers. In Barnes’s books, people don’t get worn down by compulsions of the flesh, nor deranged by the pursuit of fame and money: they fall victim to exhaustion of the brain – they become, as Barnes himself might put it, all quizzed out.īut they are not mad. In his case, even the answers to his questions are really questions-in-disguise. In Flaubert’s Parrot, the narrator is a biographer – another snoopy type. In Before she met me, the hero of the book actually suffered from interrogation-mania: try as he might, he couldn’t stop himself wondering about the details of his wife’s past loveaffairs. Julian Barnes once trained to be a barrister and he’s been asking questions ever since – questions, mostly, about questions.
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