Julian Barnes: The Lemon Table

Reviewed by MICHELE HEWITSON

Of all the gifts age might bring, perhaps the most luxurious is the time and ability to reflect.

To reflect suggests a looking back. But not all the characters in Julian Barnes' new collection of stories about becoming old are involved in such a pursuit.

By turns - and there is something of a carnival air about this assortment of the odd and the old - acerbic, hopeful, regretful, tender and plain horrible, all his assorted cast have in common is that they are old.

Or observers of old age. In The Fruit Cage, a son watches his father, who at the age of 81 has left his wife of many years for a last fling with a younger woman.

Why, asks the son, "make the assumption that the heart shuts down alongside the genitals"? Quite likely, he concludes, because we have an idea, a no doubt necessary assumption, that with old age comes serenity.

Heartache, and the flutters of the heart, we assume, belong to the young.

As does sex. The upright major of Hygiene, disguised as a little story about the trials of domesticity, married life and the struggles of living on a pension, is really a tale about what keeps people going. For the major it is his long-term prostitute, Babs, whom he has been seeing for years under the guise of regimental reunions.

There is not much sex; there is much comfort. There seems little harm, although death brings not just the loss of a body, but the loss of a fantasy.

In Appetite, the retired dentist with Alzheimers can be calmed, some of the time, by his wife reading recipe books aloud to him. There is a joke within an uneasy joke here.

The dentist, like Barnes, has always been a pedant in the kitchen (the title, and topic, of Barnes' last collection, in which he gave amusing accounts of his own struggles with the imprecision of recipe books).

"He's always been like that, very precise," the dentist's wife notes. "If he was cooking and a recipe said: 'Take two or three spoonfuls of something', he'd get ratty." His wife reads a recipe for Caesar Salad: "One egg, two to three tablespoons of parmesan cheese."

"Two to three?"

The juice of one lemon.

"I like your figure," he says, "I've always been a tit man."

He says much worse, more shocking things, this prim man who never liked his wife making jokes in bed, or about bed.

He has always, the wife later notes, liked his food.

She says now, "I just think you should be allowed to laugh if the need arises."

There is plenty to laugh at here; plenty to wince at. And much more to think about when we think about ageing.

What I think is that this is an excellent book to read now, then to tuck away to take with you to the retirement village.

Jonathan Cape, $54.95