Unflinching reading: "Levels of Life" by Julian Barnes

This is an odd book. It is in three parts. The first, The Sin of Height, is essentially an historical essay, relating the story of early ballooning in France, and in particular the exploits of Nadar, the first man to take aerial photographs. The second, On the Level, is a quasi-fictional account of a love affair between English balloonist and general Victorian man-of-action, Captain Fred Burnaby, and the renowned French actress, Sarah Bernhardt. It ends disappointingly (for him), when Sarah shies away from the marriage he was preparing to propose, but not before they have been ballooning together, relishing their love and their ability to soar over the people below.

These two sections, which are engaging to read, but strangely light, do prepare the ground for the third part of the book, The Loss of Depth, through parallels and metaphors of love, transcendence and loss, but, more than anything, they feel like a way for Barnes to pace himself, to work up to the searing, intimate, astoundingly honest account of his own grief at the loss of his wife. 

Julian Barnes' wife, with whom he spent thirty years of his life, was Pat Kavanagh, a literary agent. She died in 2008, just thirty-seven days after being diagnosed with a brain tumour. Barnes nursed her through her last days. The Loss of Depth is not however about the illness and death - in fact Barnes respects his wife's privacy and tells us little about her - but about his experience following her death. Every love story is a potential grief story, he writes early in the book, and his description of his grief at her loss is a testament to the depth of love he felt for her.


This is not a book written in the immediate aftermath of his wife's death. Indeed it took him six years to be ready to write it, and the style of writing reflects that. There is no doubt as to the pain Barnes has endured, and continues to endure. At one point he describes his meticulous research into ways to commit suicide, when he frankly can see no reason to go on living. But, extraordinarily, Barnes writes in a measured, precise, analytical tone, picking up on the details of how he lived his grief, and how his relations with others were affected.  He takes enormous care over his words, keen to pin down with absolute precision what it felt like, what he thought, the small words and actions of friends that affronted him and, for example, why he deliberately chose not in the end to kill himself. If that sounds somehow cold, then believe me, it isn't. You feel indeed that Barnes owes it to his late wife to tell this story as best he can as the writer he is. He is serious, sincere, unrelenting, utterly honest. He is not looking for the reader's sympathy, but he does - one can tell passionately - want the reader to understand his experience. And in this he succeeds; not only, reading this, do you understand the depth of the loss Barnes has endured, but also the corresponding height of the love he felt - and feels - for her. This is how his grief story is also very much a love story.