Autumn 2026 – Valery Loots – Departure(s)

This creative critical essay explores Julian Barnes’ latest and last novel Departure(s) by having a conversation about it, with Departure(s). From the total 176 questions scattered throughout the novel, addressed to the reader, the characters, and to Barnes himself, a handful were selected to construct an interview.

On a Thursday evening, just as I’d clocked out of my student job — and by clocking out I mean clicking away Teams — I clocked in to school. Beside me lay the hardcover copy of Julian Barnes’ 2026 novel Departure(s). I had taken off the sleeve, which only covered half the book in the first place, and was staring at the reviews that showed themselves when the book was bare. 

“A mesmeric original” says Philip Larkin.

“A master storyteller” says New York Review of Books.

“One of the world’s finest English writers” says Washington Post. Woah. 

The spine of the book cracked as I opened it, but I pressed it down with my palm to keep it from closing on itself. On page 107 I counted ten questions. Half of them went unanswered, sitting peacefully on the page, content to remain suspended in ink….

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I wake up dressed in a brown, tweed dress, with a matching tailored jacket. I am sitting on a medallion chair, one of my legs crossed over the other, and I am leaning slightly to the right. On the table next to me stand two cups of tea, both with milk in them. The goldframed edges and handle of the teacup make the porcelain look untouchable. I don’t really like tea, so I think I accepted it to be polite. Next to the steaming liquid lies a grey voice recorder. Am I interviewing someone?

A wrinkled hand reaches for the handle of the cup farthest right, and when I look up, I find an old man drinking from it. He cannot be younger than seventy-five, and his face will not stay still. His features drift in and out of place, rearranging themselves in subtle ways. His eyes go from blue to green to grey and back; before I can register one colour, another takes its place.

Here’s what I can make out:

1. His hair remains grey, and his skin holds a consistent light tone.

2. I recognise this room, because I recognise the armrest I am leaning on. The medallion chair belongs to the Ritz: we are in London. 

3. I know him. It is my friend.

I think he asks me if I am ready, his finger hovering over the play button of the recorder. As I instinctively say yes, I realise that I am the one getting interviewed. By Julian Barnes? No. Not exactly. By Departure(s), I think.  

 He—it?—presses play. 

D: “So how are you doing, old friend…?”

V: I’m doing quite well, actually. Thank you for asking. I’m glad we could sit down and talk about you.

D: “What are you up to?”

V: Not much. I have been writing a bit, studying a lot. I have also thought about you a great deal since I finished reading you.

D: “…and whichever way were your thoughts tending?”

V: I initially understood you to be a book about memory. At first glance, that seems like the easiest way to make sense of you. You move between memories, essays on memories, reflections on ageing and death written in the shadow of Barnes’ illness, stories about relationships such as Stephen and Jean’s, and questions about how we remember ourselves and other people.

But the more I revise what Barnes wrote, the form you take, and the content you possess, the less convincing it becomes to treat you as a theory of memory at all. The shifting claims you contain, combined with your unstable form, enact a struggle between experience and the desire to give that experience meaning.  

D: “We all know memory is identity; take away memory and what do we have?”

V: I believe memory to be part of identity, not identity as a whole. Memory is one side of the coin; the other side is forgetting. Throughout your pages, Barnes builds up arguments, goes back, breaks them down, and comes to a different conclusion almost as often as he sticks to the beliefs he presents. The conversational form of the content, and the refusal to hold onto definite conclusions, does exactly what a good book should do: it immerses the reader. Fantasy books do this with secret kingdoms, but Barnes does it by turning you into a conversation.

Readers can either agree or disagree, and Barnes reinforces this idea by coming back to former points and changing his final verdict. An example of this is that he starts the novel by implying that identity cannot exist without memory, but as his argument progresses, he shifts his opinion and eventually he comes to a different conclusion: that memory does not always entirely equal identity.

The intertextuality Barnes weaves in you adds to the idea that our attempts to understand experience are always mediated by narratives that can themselves be revised. His meditation on memory in the first chapter of the book is philosophically layered, using Marcel Proust, Virginia Woolf, and Friedrich Nietzsche to deepen Proust’s concept of Involuntary Autobiographical Memory (IAMs). By doing this, Barnes shows that the words and thoughts of others become a mechanism through which we understand ourselves and our opinions. Our identity is equally forged from the ideas and philosophies of others that we keep, and the ones we ‘throw away.’. 

D: “Life and memory can be so… quixotic, don’t you find?”

V: To some extent, I agree. Look at all my philosophical answers so far. How pretentious of me? 

Or… take Stephen. When he asks Julian — who had grown into more of a casual acquaintance rather than the close friend he used to be at Oxford forty years earlier — to help get him into contact with his college sweetheart Jean again, there is a considerable urge for romance right off the bat. He orchestrates a scenario in which he just so happens to walk by as Julian and Jean have coffee together, fabricating an idealised meet-cute — or rather re-meet-cute, but that is a lot of dashes.

Unknowingly, Stephen puts a pressure on the relationship to perform as romance “should” perform — whatever way that may be — and not let the passionate second love dwindle into more of a collegial companionship. Ironically, and even a bit comically, it seems to have the opposite effect on his counterpart.  

At one point, Stephen offers to run Jean a bath after reading online that it’s the most romantic thing to do for your partner. Later, Jean complains about it to Julian. Stephen’s actions are based on what he thinks is necessary to “get it right” this time around and are fuelled by the knowledge that it already went south once before. He has idealised this second chance, glorified it to such an extent that he believes he must act above and beyond to keep it.

Perhaps if Stephen had reflected more on the fact that forty years had passed, he wouldn’t have felt like he needed to replicate the romance they had in their twenties. Barnes recognises this in his own interactions with Stephen and Jean, thinking to himself on the pages “And what did I expect? That I could somehow pick up with them and continue as if all those years had never existed?”

It’s hard to let go of the idealised memory or expectation of something or someone, but sometimes it is necessary to make something work.

D: “Who says novelists aren’t capable of being practical in life?” 

V: Barnes is the novelist. You’re the novel. Me…I am just fascinated with melancholy.

D: “But isn’t that what all novelists are, essentially? in their books, at least.”

V: I mean, I guess so. 

D: “So I suppose this isn’t curable?”

V: I am afraid it isn’t. Manageable, maybe. 

D: “‘Incurable yet manageable’, that sounds like… life doesn’t it?”

V: Yes, it does.

D: “Though there are inevitably, some dreamers who attempt to evade this existential question?”

V: I think Julian might be one himself, depending on how one looks at it. 

D: “Is that right?”

V: Yes. Writing a book about your personal life and memories could itself be seen as a kind of attempt to evade disappearance. The book consists of memories, diary entries, arguments, and reflections on philosophers and other literary critics. It’s unstable, but Barnes has still orchestrated the instability.

In the way Barnes has crafted you, you resist finality remarkably well. There is an intentional absence of a “final meaning,” a “final conclusion,” or a “final goodbye,” but there is a finished version. You are, after all, a completed book. Instability dominates you, but it is still a carefully woven thread that has been selected, arranged, and constructed to fit between a front and a back cover.

Barnes cannot avoid an ending; he can only make the finished form acknowledge its own incompleteness. And he does so, all the way until the final page. The book doesn’t end with the conclusion of Jean and Stephen’s love story, nor with a definite outlook on the rest of Julian’s life or a clear resolution to his blood cancer. He goes on, for about forty to fifty pages, and ends with the reader. Even as he leaves, he doesn’t go out with a bang. Instead, he fades away like an old memory as he urges the reader to keep looking ahead.

And yet, the book ends. There is finality. 

D: “And then what?”

V: Then it is up to the reader to continue the instability. To always keep questioning what seemed settled, to change our minds, to change it back, and to allow the same book to mean something else at a different time. Barnes offers a final page, but encourages the resistance to assign a final meaning to it. So, I won’t. I won’t give you a final meaning. I won’t think that anything is final at all, even the end. Unless I’m proven otherwise, of course.

D: “Well that’s all right then, isn’t it?”

V: Yes, it is…Were those all your questions? 

D: “Do you want me to go now?”

V: Of course not. You can stay as long as you want to. We can do some people-watching if you’d like. You start.

D: “What do you make of that couple — married, or having an affair?”

V: Affair, they’re too into each other.

D: “What does that kiss mean?”

V: She’s not as into him as he is, but she doesn’t want to let go of him for some reason. Must be the quixotic thing we just talked about. 

D: “…And why are they looking at us all of a sudden?”

V: Uhm… I don’t know. 

Suddenly, everyone in the tearoom is looking at us. They stand up, and walk closer over to our table, faces changing colour, proportions, and shape with every step. As they charge at us, I turn to Departure(s) one last time, but I just see my own eyes. 

I wake up. I fell asleep on the fucking book. 

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