Staring at the Sun

We first meet Jean Serjeant at about the age of ten and her rather fey Uncle Leslie who plays golf, indulges in tricks, seems to have no means of income, but who relates wonderfully to the imagination of a ten year old girl. He plays a trick on her using golf tees to simulate the buds of hyacinths in a pot given at Christmas that he warns must remain wrapped until spring because light will stunt their growth. When Jean finally does unwrap the pot completely in spring she discovers the golf tees and has her first life lesson to the effect that things are rarely what they seem to be whether dealing with hyacinths or relationships or love and that while one might have certainty, one rarely has definitive answers to questions. Jean’s show more family billets a fighter pilot named Tommy Prosser who has seen the sun rise twice in the same day out over the English Channel and with whom Jean very tentatively explores the meaning of bravery and fear and death. Jean meets Michael, a policeman, during the WWII and they get married; the sexual aspect of the marriage is a disaster because of their mutual ignorance of the pleasures possible, and their inability to communicate about it (reminds of Ian McEwan’s description of a disastrous wedding night and similar failures of communication in On Chesil Beach). Jean is stifled with Michael: “After the guilty disappointment of the honeymoon came the longer, slower dismay of living together,” when Jean’s fantasy that “ the life of high, airy skies and light, loose clouds would continue”, was replaced by, “the slow dulling of enjoyment and the arrival of tired discourtesies.”

Jean leaves Michael, as she said she would, when she is about seven months pregnant, “Pregnancy seemed to nudge her into wider expectations, and her easy capriciousness whispered like a secret breeze that character need not be fixed.” She raises her son Gregory by herself, moving constantly about England from one service job to another, never having contact again with Michael. At the end of the book, Jean is 100 years old and her son is an old man, never married, somewhat reclusive and wrestling with death and the idea of suicide.

Such, in bare bones, is the structure of the novel but, as is usual with Barnes, this is more a novel of ideas and questions than a story or a narrative meant to grip and hold the reader. Barnes deals with a number of his favourite themes: the meaning of identity; fear and acceptance of death and the manner of facing death; the veracity, appeal and meaning of religion and religious beliefs; bravery and how it is manifest; what is the meaning of knowledge and wisdom.

Bravery comes in many forms. It can be internal to the sense of one’s self and one’s own beliefs and behaviours and it can, at the same time, be manifest in some external act that affects others, perhaps even involving sacrifice of life. Is bravery the absence of fear or the overcoming of it? Is it brave to die with courage, even grace? Is it not brave to “carry on believing all your life what you believed at the start of it” instead of just relapsing into what other people believe?

What is a good death? Is it, “…simply this: the best death you could manage in the circumstances, regardless of medical help. Or again, more simply still: a good death was any death not swamped by agony, fear and protest.” Or, perhaps, “…courage in the face of death was only part of it; perhaps faking courage for those who loved you was the greater, higher courage.”

I rather like Barnes’s view that, “Knowledge didn’t really advance, it only seemed to. The serious questions always remained unanswered.” And the view that if one can’t necessarily attain wisdom, one can at least discard, “all stupidity”.

We are so much, and so often, defined by the expectations and the attitudes of others: “You grew old first not in your own eyes, but in other people’s eyes; then, slowly, you agreed with their opinion of you. It wasn’t that you couldn’t walk as far as you used to, it was that other people didn’t expect you to; and if they didn’t, then it needed vain obstinacy to persist.”

Gregory resorts to something called the GPC: General Purposes Computer which is supposed to answer any and all questions concerning facts and life. Barnes published this book in 1987 so the GPC is eerily prescient of our Google/Wikipedia universe and medical computer programs that are even used for psychological assessments and which researchers find some people take very personally as real conversations. An irony is that Gregory doesn’t know that the GPC is actually staffed by people who construct the replies. In any case, Gregory searches the GPC for answers to his fear of death and oblivion and if it is morally permissible to commit suicide which is now allowed and even facilitated in society. Finally, Gregory turns to his 100-year old mother for advice: “Is death absolute? Yes, dear….Is religion nonsense? Yes, dear….Is suicide permissible? No, dear”.

Jean concludes her life with the belief that “religion was piffle; of course death was absolute….Of course we each had a soul, a miraculous core of individuality; it was just that putting ‘immortal’ in front of the word made no sense. It was not a real answer. We had a mortal soul, a destructible soul, and that was perfectly all right.”

The book begins with a description of Tommy Prosser seeing the sun rise twice in the same morning as he flew over the English Channel, diving below the horizon after the first sunrise to see it happen again. The circle is wonderfully closed when Jean, at 100, gets Gregory to arrange a private flight at sundown so she can see the sun set twice. This is the description of the second setting of the sun:

“The fingers of cloud no longer lay between her and the sun. They were face to face. She did not, however, give it any sign of greeting. She did not smile, and she tried very hard not to blink. The sun’s descent seemed quicker this time, a smooth slipping-away. The earth did not greedily chase it, but lay flatly back with its mouth open. The big orange sun settled on the horizon, yielded a quarter of its volume to the accepting earth, then a half, then three-quarters, and then, easily, without argument, the final quarter. For some minutes a glow continued from beneath the horizon, and Jean did, at last, smile towards this post-mortal phosphorescence. Then the aeroplane turned away, and they began to lose height.”

Beautiful. show less

Julian Barnes has certainly improved a bit in the last 25 years. I recently read his wonderful latest book, The Sense of an Ending (review here: http://www.goodreads.com/review/show/309538011), and for my second Barnes, turned to this, one of his earliest, from 1986. Both books document a long life, but the style is very different. There is a promising novel struggling to reveal itself here, but this isn't it.

It is the story of Jean, told in three parts: as a late teen on the cusp of marriage at the end of WW2, in middle age, and then approaching her 100th birthday in 2020. The first two are conventional enough, but the third is too concerned with theology (15 different arguments for and against the existence of God/gods), radical show more feminism, euthanasia and elderly care, philosophy, "big brother" and futurology. The points of debate echo issues in earlier sections, but it just doesn't work as a coherent narrative and the character development didn't ring true.

Jean is naive and not especially intelligent or well-educated, and as the story is told from her point of view, the first section in particular is told in a rather abrupt and simple style that I didn't find very enticing. Somehow, by the middle section, she is taking expensive long-haul holidays on her own - and with her teenage son's blessing.

The coverage of sex is both poignant (reminiscent of McEwan's On Chesil Beach (review here: http://www.goodreads.com/review/show/23326931)) and comical - especially the excerpts of a coy sex manual and appointments with a family planning doctor who merely baffles Jean.

The descriptions of loneliness are well-done, too: "He had girlfriends, but he found, when he was with them, that he never felt quite what he was expected to feel: the inaccessibility of group pleasure, he discovered, could even extend to gatherings of two. Sex didn't make him feel lonely; but it didn't... make him feel particularly accompanied. As for male camaraderie, there often seemed something false about it. Groups of men got together because they feared complications.... they wanted certainty; they wanted definite rules. Look at monasteries. Look at pubs."

The final section was written almost before the internet, but spends a lot of time describing a cross between Wikipedia and Google, and people's relationship with it ("Sessions might turn you from a serious enquirer into a mere gape-mouthed browser."). It's cleverly prescient, though not totally accurate, which exacerbates the contrast between the this section and the more realistic earlier sections.

The recurring themes are fear and bravery: fear of flying, death, sex (McEwan), state snooping, and God, but they are light in the first part and overindulged in the final section. Related to that, there's a fair amount of running away, both literal and metaphorical.

Despite my criticisms, there are flashes of the wordsmith to come:

* "The word 'prostitute' sidled into her mind like a vamp through a door."
* "Phrases dropped from the page and stuck like burrs to her winceyette nightdress."
* "What puzzled her was how closely you could live beside someone without any sense of intimacy."
* "Market towns - the sort of places with a bus garage but no cathedral."
* "The hurricane, excreting the black smoke of its own obituary."
* "The presence of this forceful girl rendering him almost translucent."
* "The night's clouds oozed drizzle onto the car."
* "Anyway I don't think you're a... lesbian... her pause disinfecting the word, making it sound distant and theoretical."
* "a very old Electrolux shaver... so old-fashioned in design that it looked like something else, perhaps a sexual appliance of unpopular function."! show less

An absolute masterpiece. Wow.

I loved this book for so many reasons, from its unpredictability to the ideas and fragments that echo throughout. At one stage, as I entered the final part, I had to check the publication date (the mid-1980s), as Barnes makes reference to a kind of proto-wokeness and even a sort of ChatGPT. Dazzling - as dazzling as seeing the sun rise twice.

To begin with this book had the strong feel of a cross between 'Spies' by Michael Frayn & 'On Chesil Beach' by Ian McEwan, (although of course it predates both), set in the 1940s initially and moving forward from there. I liked the feel of the book.

The last third went a bit weird though, forseeing a slightly dystopian near-future, where euthanasia is legal and even encouraged, with a sort of 1980s vision of the internet/wikipedia dispensing knowledge, but as authorised by the government.

Interesting ideas on death and religion are what kept me engaged to the end despite the slightly dated feel of the envisioned future.

Jean Serjeant 1921-2021 recounts surviving a life of ordinary miracles, strongly affected by the adolescent memory of a WWII RAF pilot who chose death via flying into the sun. Nature of a working/middle class woman’s life in postwar UK who senses there is more to life, and more to herself, than what she was led to believe. Remarkable prescience of internet! Nothing much happened yet it covers an entire life; commentary on aging, death, how we impose meaning on life. POV = 2 characters, mother and son. Her recollection doesn’t include much about her parents, society or the practicalities of her life, it’s a very internal world. Witnesses the 7 Wonders of the World with some adjustments and defines her own 7 miracles of the world.

A show more boomerang book: Didn’t care for the book the first time, read it too fast, much better the second reading. show less

This book certainly gives one food for thought, in all directions and on different levels. And I quite understand why it is highly acclaimed ("A stunning book." - BOOKLIST calls it). What I minded, though, was the ever-present sense of morbidity throughout the narrative. I would have also wished for a more detailed account of the heroine's life - after all she lived almost a century. To me, her character was not sufficiently developed, somewhat hazy. Her son, the other protagonist, who sort of takes over in the last third of the book, is tormented by doubts about God, death, suicide - which adds to the less inflammatory quandaries that have bothered his mother since she was a young girl, and which, altogether, is the food for thought show more mentioned above. show less

Interesting examination of what is courage and how we deal with death. The time frame moves from pre WW2 to an imagined future seen mainly through the experiences of a mother and her son.