Julian Barnes: Something to declare

By ELSPETH SANDYS

The French revere Julian Barnes, Joanna Trollope tells us on the back cover, while we (the English-speakers) quite wrongly just admire him. I beg to differ. I have long revered Julian Barnes as a novelist (not uncritically - his stories can be too cool, too clever) for his honesty, his eye for what is permanent in the passing parade, and his ability to look into unexpected corners, whether they be in futuristic England, post-communist Bulgaria, the jungles of South America, or France, ancient and modern.

The essays in Something to Declare are, as one would expect from a polymath like Barnes, quirky, esoteric, unapologetically revealing of personal likes and dislikes. The European Union, he announces in the preface to this book, is "less about friendly difference than about centralisation of power and commercial harmonisation creating an ever-bigger pool of docile consumers for transnational corporations".

When I read that I shouted my agreement out loud, something I found myself doing again and again.

Wonderful characters - literary, sporting, musical, legends of film - stalk the pages of this book. Henry James, Edith Wharton, Jean-Paul Sartre, Georges Simenon (who boasted he had slept with 10,000 women), Baudelaire, Turgenev, Jean-Luc Goddard, Francois Truffaut, Tommy Simpson, the British world-champion cyclist who died while competing in the Tour de France in 1967, Elizabeth David, who transformed British eating habits after World War II- all make vivid appearances.

As does Barnes' most admired literary exemplar, Gustave Flaubert, to whom half the essays are devoted. "I wish he'd shut up about Flaubert!" Kingsley Amis once complained - advice which, happily, Barnes chose to ignore.

"The French," Barnes tells us, "treat the arts as central to life, rather than some add-on, like a set of alloy wheels. Is it any wonder I'm a Francophile?"

I can't resist one final quote. Here is Barnes on writers: "Writers are dangerous. They are also, frequently, not very nice in a way specific to writers by making clear that it is they who fix the official version of events. Those who live close to writers sooner or later strike against this discouraging truth."

In my next life I'm going to be a market gardener.

Picador

$27.95

* Norman Bilbrough is a Wellington writer; Rhonda Bartle is a New Plymouth writer; Gilbert Wong is an Auckland journalist, Elspeth Sandys' most recent novel is A Passing Guest.