The Parrot and the Porcupine

One week ago at the Four Seasons Hotel in Boston, over sturgeon, chips and a magnum of champagne (or was it a cup of tea?), the British novelist, Julian Barnes, famous for his inscrutability, consented to let me interview him. The official photographs of Barnes show a darkly brooding, almost Mephistophelean presence. He is in real life, taller and blonder than one would ever dare imagine, inhabiting a room effortlessly and completely. He is neither tweedy like Michael Holroyd nor dandiacal like Tom Wolfe and sits coiled in a too-small armchair. His presence is gently mocking. We tacitly acknowledge the irony which is inherent in the enterprise of claiming privacy, even while performing the ancillary activities which accompany literary success.

The 46 year old Barnes was in the United States to promote his most recent novel, The Porcupine. The title comes from a phrase which the author remembers while studying Russian at school: "I must handle him (any difficult character) with porcupine gloves."

The novel reflects an engagement with European history and politics and indeed its genesis is rooted in Barnes' long term interest in European history and politics. It is set in a fictional Eastern European country and is loosely based on Bulgaria. Barnes had visited the country two years ago, just after the Bulgarians had ousted their dictator and had democratic elections for the first time. He was emotionally taken by the people of the country and the emotional spur of being there.

The Porcupine renders in loving detail, the trial of a fictional ex-communist leader, and the ascent of the man who prosecutes him. Its themes also include the glacial pace of change and documents the parturition pains of a newly emerging democracy. It has been published at a particularly opportune time. The trial of former German leader Erich Honecker and the entire communist system now occupies much of our attention here in the west.

Barnes sees communism, as practiced in the Soviet Union and its former satellites "as a corruption of a set of principles, at base idealistic which went wrong." he recalls being impressed by Gunter Grass's essays, "Two States-One Nation?) which, although enormously popular during the euphoria which accompanied the unification of Germany, were eerily prescient, foretelling the economic and social troubles which are now plaguing that country.

He was warned by his barristers in England that the novel was certain to offend several people, including Mikhail Gorbachev, Queen Elizabeth, Frank Sinatra and Nancy Reagan. Barnes is perhaps the only novelist writing today who could plausibly insert a reference to the torrid geriatric sex, in which the last two allegedly indulged, in a novel about post-communist Eastern Europe.

The novel is what one would expect from a man as prodigiously gifted as Barnes, a man whose felicitous turn of phrase, diverse themes and omnivorous curiosity occasion universal admiration in circles literary and otherwise. There are few contemporary writers who have attempted to tackle such disparate topics and with such success as Barnes has. With alarming competence and brio, he ranges from sexual jealousy to disquisitions on art, from poignant, elegant meditations on love to the nightmare that is suburban life.

He is incapable of being confined to any one theme. His dazzling prose and exquisite reworking of oft-prosaic themes reflect a formidable talent, harnessed in the service of sheer pleasure as well as intellectual challenge.

Barnes' novels defy categorization. He is best known for Flaubert's Parrot (1984) and the ambitiously titled, A History Of The World In 10 1/2 Chapters. Talking It Over (1991) also garnered extraordinary critical and popular acclaim.

He has won a number of international prizes, including the Somerset Maugham Award for Metroland (published in 1980) as well as the French Prix Medicis. His name is invoked in hushed reverential tones whenever there is speculation about candidates for the Booker Prize (Britain's prestigious literary award). He acknowledges that he is not writing for the average library borrower (or one suspects the little old lady from Dubuque), yet his work is not inaccessible.

Barnes professes to live a reclusive life with his wife in North London but counts among his close friends, novelist and bon vivant Martin Amis, Ian McEwan and the gregarious Jay McInerney. He admits to being a part of the chattering classes as the London literary-intelligentsia is known. His Oxbridge credentials serve as his passport to this class. He attended Magdalen College, Oxford where he says he was terribly bored.

He worked at the New Spectator (a liberal British magazine), as a lexicographer on the Oxford English Dictionary, and as a television critic for The Observer, all the while working on what would be his first published novel Metroland.

Barnes is frank about the brutal realities of living as a novelist in England. "It is difficult to make a living as a novelist in Britain, until one is about forty. The Donna Tartt scenario would be impossible in Britain. The ascent there is slower than it is here in America where a novelist, having achieved some measure of success changes his hair, his house, his wife, his entire life while in Britain, a successful novelist considers taking his publicist to lunch." He admires the work of Cheever and Updike but resolutely adheres to his ambitious (if brashly stated) mission of renovating the English novel, unencumbered by the work of other writers.

The novelist is also the London correspondent for the New Yorker (yes, the one who recounted Margaret Thatcher's refusal to be consigned to "ermined dotage"). He laconically says that he is miffed at the prospect of being one of many voices at the magazine and loyally (even strenuously) defends the appointment of its new editor, Tina Brown.

Barnes also writes pseudonynously as Dan Kavanaugh, crafting thrillers which focus on a the adventures of a bisexual detective. Barnes concedes however that he is stymied by the realities and responsibilities of AIDS on his protagonist's sexual exploits.

Beneath the irony and polish, Barnes' seems to be enormously vulnerable. He reminds me of one of those boys you knew in high school, not exactly shy, but coolly appraising and refracting experiences through the prism of detachment, hampered by their cleverness. But you did not dismiss them because you realized the enormity of their potential.

Barnes' reserve is immensely appealing. The person who emerges seems to be that rarest of creatures, a man who understands the infinite allure and necessity of mystery. In an era when too many novelists traffic in meaningless psychobabble, Barnes' novels represent a continent of hope. His work reveals that the obituaries lamenting the death of the novel are premature. A new Barnes' novel demands a magnum of champagne.