I’m grateful to my brother Andrys for bringing Levels of Life to my attention.
He is aware, of course, of my discursive yet deeply personal interest in books about grief and dealing with the death a life partner, and we share a huge respect for Julian Barnes, who – as you might know – shares second place with Cormac McCarthy as to the number of their books I’ve read.
I didn’t, however, know that Barnes had in 2013 written this book, about how he dealt with the death of his wife Pat Kavanagh in 2008.
I’ve previously mentioned that I most closely identified with books on the topic written by women, especially women who were, and are, great writers. Levels of Life has turned that around. Barnes is, of course, a great writer – one of the greatest – but his perspective as a man resonated with me more strongly than any other book I’ve read on grieving the loss of a partner.
This is not to diminish in any way the books by Siri Hustvedt, Geraldine Brooks, or Joan Didion, only to acknowledge that Barnes matches my mindset in very many specific ways.
There are common threads to these books that Barnes articulates very well, such as the lack of belief in a classic religious version of an afterlife, putting faith instead in the survivor’s continuing awareness of and attachment to the deceased.
the fact that someone is dead may mean that they are not alive, but doesn’t mean that they do not exist.
Exactly. This is not denial: on the contrary, it’s affirmation.
I feel Barnes could understand perfectly well why I choose to continue to live in the house Hazel lived, and died, in. She’s around me every day, and that’s a considerable comfort.
Levels of Life is only 144 pages long, divided into three sections. In the first, Barnes appears to ramble about 19th century hot air ballooning and photography, focusing on a Frenchman who pioneered aerial photography, an English colonel who was also a pioneer balloonist, and the actress Sarah Bernhardt.
In the second section, he brings the colonel and the actress together in what I presume is a fictionalised account of their interactions, infused by requited but unfulfilled passion.
It’s the third section that brings all this together into an understanding of how Barnes felt on the death of his wife, just 37 days after a diagnosis of a brain tumour, and after 30 years together. The literal perspectives introduced by aerial photography, the hopeless love of a soldier for an actress, the inevitable sequences of life and death, form a whole.
In inimitable Barnes style, it all makes sense, even as none of it makes any sense at all.
It’s significant that Barnes never names his wife in the book, and that it took five years for him to be able to write it.
I suspect it’s because of this that Levels of Life is a highly articulate as well as an intensely emotional and cathartic book about grief and grieving without coming anywhere near bathos, nor intellectualised dispassion.
Highly recommended.