I’m getting tired of Grief Memoirs

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I recently read ‘Levels of Life’ (2013) by Julian Barnes, a literary homage and grief-stricken memoir dedicated to his wife, Pat Kavanagh, a literary agent who died in 2008.

I am in two minds about Barnes (as I am as regards his peer group of Ian McEwan and Martin Amis). They come from the same upper-middle-class milieu, cleave to the same bien-pensant views, held as superior to the ‘philistinism’ of those less intellectually- and culturally-endowed.

And yet their tragedy is that they have so very little to say, condemned as they are by history and circumstance to be subject to no significant oppression, no injustice or hardship of any real kind.

Their work is all style and no substance. Elegant and well-turned for sure, but instantly forgettable. And when it is not, it takes the form of failed experimental literature: unreadable writing-games for the sake of crude novelty.

And so Julian Barnes’s thoughts turn to that most powerful, destabilising emotion: the unbearable grief of losing a loved one. And this most difficult literary challenge is somehow beyond him. The very self-regard and self-righteousness which propels him in his elite literary trajectory now colours his own account of trauma with the sins of vanity and self-indulgence, self-pity and the taking of spiteful revenge.

‘Levels of Life’ starts with the two short stories of nineteenth century balloonists. This introduction, an over-elaborate and frankly tedious metaphor for later grief, is a kind of bait-and-switch. The manoeuvre is sabotaged by the tedium of the bait itself, which hardly encourages the reader to continue to the actual point of the book: the switch from soldierly and thespian balloonists to Pat Kavanagh and the effects of her death on the author.

Parts of this third part are worth reading - Barnes, after all, is not without talent - and the best bits are where he is the snarkiest about his friends and literary acquaintances. But his introspective account of how grief feels is only Wikipedia-interesting, and is often, one feels, coloured by a certain self-absorption.

Following the death of a loved one, grief lasts a long time and you never really get over it.

Beyond that, we’re in seriously diminishing marginal returns from this literary genre. No more!

"Sweet Tooth" - Ian McEwan

Product description:

"Serena Frome, the beautiful daughter of an Anglican bishop, has a brief affair with an older man during her final year at Cambridge, and finds herself being groomed for the intelligence services.

The year is 1972. Britain, confronting economic disaster, is being torn apart by industrial unrest and terrorism and faces its fifth state of emergency."

Serena seems a strange recruit to "Five". She has a third from Cambridge, where she took maths under her mother's formidable influence (she'd wanted to study English at Leicester) and she's emotional, naive and immature.

This is 1972 and women in MI5 toil in menial clerical jobs. But Serena is attractive and a novel-junkie, so who better to liaise with suitable up-and-coming authors in a covert MI5 funding operation (Sweet Tooth) fighting the communists in the culture wars. But for Serena, everything is personal: there is no way this is going to end well.

Ian McEwan has written another inspired novel. It's not le Carre - not an intelligence-insider's novel - but the atmosphere is similarly insecure, no-one's motives can be taken at face-value.

McEwen effectively evokes the dysfunctional feel of the 1970s, when everything was going pear-shaped, but his most effective skewering is of the stupidity of the intelligence agencies themselves.

Oh, and the twist at the end is completely brilliant.