By Sara Sadeghi Avai
Julian Barnes manages to bring history to life in this romantic and rather academic story. We are thrown into the middle of a university philosophy class and, along with every other classmate, watch as Neil falls in love with Professor Finch and her stoic ways. Barnes’s ability to create love and admiration of one character by another gives way to the boundless magic of imagination and humanity in writing. The author has built and broken a character in front of our eyes, and what we (and Neil) are privy to about Elizabeth’s life haunts us. Split into three parts, the book constitutes an academic essay about Julian the Apostate—a philosophical and historical icon for Elizabeth and the subject of Neil’s eventual tribute to her—sandwiched between Neil’s intimate account of learning about his beloved and respectable professor through her death, her past, and ultimately his own future.
Our first-person narrator is a beautifully spoken one and although one can argue the main character is Elizabeth Finch, I would argue that it is Neil who becomes the dreamlike person we readers would love to meet. We learn of his relationship with Elizabeth throughout the story, and Barnes is immaculate in placing clues in Neil’s sentences, creating the sense that Neil is telling us a story and laying the crumbs for us to follow. Does she love Neil, too? Or is their friendship just one of a love of academia and life’s great questions?
Suffice it to say I was hooked from the first page, and my love of academia lore, the professor-student dynamic, and romantic stoics drank up each page. Although the middle chapter felt like a small interruption to a flawless narration, the final chapter combined nostalgic emotion and present-time feelings, creating a catharsis in the story’s final pages. As an English major, this was an absolute win for me, and I would recommend it to any history or romantic buffs.
Thank you to Random House Canada Publishing for providing a complimentary copy of the novel for an honest review.