The art of leaving | Review of Departure(s), Julian Barnes’s “last book”

Departure(s) opens with a narrator, who both is and isn’t Julian Barnes (though the latter is also a novelist named Julian Barnes), writing about involuntary autobiographical memory, before declaring, almost casually, that there were “two things to mention at this stage: there will be a story — or a story within the story — but not just yet; this will be my last book.” 

Over the course of five sections and 150 pages, we are taken through timelines — the 1960s, 2010s, and the more recent pandemic years — and meditations on memory, fallibility, ageing, illness, love, identity, the limitations of language, the nature of the novelist, and of course death, that ultimate, inevitable, departure without subsequent arrival. And as the titular exits unspool, fiction, memoir, and essay blur and meld until it is impossible for the reader to differentiate between fact and figment.

Even the book design and marketing offer nods and winks: the U.S. title is Departure(s): A Novel, while the U.K. edition is simply Departure(s) with its jacket informing us that it is “a work of fiction — but that doesn’t mean it’s not true”. Not to mention the narrator who writes in turns that “we can and should trust novelists when they tell us the beautiful lies of their fiction” but also that he’d promised never to write about Jean and Stephen and has decided to pseudonymise them here, after their deaths, so, “if I broke that oath, how dependable is my promise to you of authenticity (of the story in question)?”

Mechanics of memory

The promised “story” begins in section two. Stephen and Jean are two fellow Oxford University students and friends whom the narrator was responsible for first introducing sometime around 1964-68 (“you can google that, if you wish,” we are told), and reuniting 40 years later. We know from the blurb that the couple will “fall in love when they are young and again when they are old”, and are also told at the outset that this is a story with no middle.

What the book does in the middle, in section three sandwiched between the beginning and end of Stephen and Jean’s story, is fast forward to the future, when the narrator is diagnosed with a rare blood cancer during the early pandemic (author Barnes himself was diagnosed with myeloproliferative neoplasm in March 2020). In a section that has more levity and humour than one would expect, he discovers that his condition is incurable but manageable (“that sounds like life, doesn’t it?”) and with a daily chemo pill, his life expectancy is not seriously compromised (so long as he dodges the 5% chance of another mutation).

Julian Barnes after being announced as the winner of The Man Booker Prize 2011, for his novel, The Sense of an Ending.
| Photo Credit:
Getty Images

Even here, his preoccupations are with the mechanics of memory, “that place where degradation and embellishment overlap”. In “a demonstration of how memory (and record-keeping) works, and of what gets forgotten as the mind processes its vast input of ‘facts’ to be stored”, he compares: the writing from memory at the section’s start, the notes scribbled while in the hospital before receiving the specifics of his diagnosis, the “brief, alarmed” two-and-a-half page notes for what he assumed would be his final book (the “provisionally awful and archly self-pitying” titled Jules Was), and finally his diary, which contains the most complete version.

On his own terms

If you aren’t used to reading the author, you may question the hybrid nature of this “official departure, (my) final conversation”. To which he’d probably reply, just like the narrator when Jean tells him, in true Barnesian meta fashion, that “this hybrid thing” he does is a mistake: “I don’t mind you not liking my books, but you are mistaken if you think I don’t know exactly what I’m up to when I write them.” He would add that he has always believed “form is as important as subject matter”.

If nothing else (which is far from true), Departure(s) proves that Julian Barnes does know exactly what he’s doing. This is a writer still admirably in control of the narrative, wielding words with not just precision and intention (even within the tangents), but also a sharp, playful intellect and an understated charm. If a last hurrah, then it is one very much on his own terms, and at the top of his ability, writing about familiar and long-time concerns.

The reviewer is a Mumbai-based author and editor.

Departure(s)

Julian Barnes

Jonathan Cape

₹999

Published – February 27, 2026 06:05 am IST