Julian Barnes in conversation with Ian McEwan (Part One)

Summary

Podcast Summary: Julian Barnes in Conversation with Ian McEwan (Part One)

Podcast: Intelligence Squared
Host: Intelligence Squared
Guests: Julian Barnes, Ian McEwan
Date: February 2, 2026

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Overview

This special live episode marks Julian Barnes’ 80th birthday and the release of his newly published novel, Departures. Barnes joins fellow novelist and long-time friend Ian McEwan at London’s Union Chapel for a candid, layered, and often humorous discussion. They explore themes from Departures—love, memory, mortality, and grief—while reflecting on their shared literary history, the evolution of British literature over five decades, and the intricate pleasures and pitfalls of the writing life.

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Key Discussion Points & Insights

1. Longstanding Friendship and Literary Camaraderie

Timestamp: 01:51 - 05:32

• McEwan remarks on their half-century friendship, calling it “50 long years” without “a cross word,” noting the significance of finally sharing a stage.
• Both recall their early days in literary London, particularly the mid-70s gatherings at the Pillars of Hercules pub and their mutual circle, including poet Ian Hamilton.
• Anecdotes about nervously reviewing each other’s work and entering the literary scene reflect both camaraderie and competition.

Key Quotes:

“Actually, this is the first time we’ve ever performed on stage together. Yeah, 50 years we’ve known one another, 50 long years.” — Julian Barnes (01:57)
“I was reviewing fiction for the New Statesman... thank God I gave it a good review.” — Julian Barnes (05:13)

2. The Pleasure of Writing and the Writer’s Journey

Timestamp: 03:54 - 09:34

• McEwan probes Barnes about moments of “writing pleasure” and milestones of happiness in his career.
• Barnes confides his own anxieties and slower start, describing himself as a “laggard” who felt overshadowed by contemporaries like McEwan and Martin Amis.
• Discussion of Barnes’ pseudonym “Edward Pygge” offers insight into the freedom and bravado afforded by anonymity in criticism and satire.

Key Quotes:

“There must have been moment when you just knew that this is going to be your entire life and you were going to be very happy.” — Ian McEwan (08:35)
“When you’re writing under a pseudonym, you can be much more self-confident, cocky and down-putting than if you’ve got your own name.” — Julian Barnes (10:10)

3. Memory, Anecdote, and the Nature of Autobiography

Timestamp: 11:20 - 25:06

• Prompted by McEwan, Barnes reads from the opening of Departures, introducing the concept of IAMs—Involuntary Autobiographical Memories—and reflecting on the uncanny reliability (or unreliability) of memory.
• The reading moves from Proustian recollection to the comic grotesque (memory triggered by bodily functions), and ultimately to philosophical musings about self-forgiveness and moral reckoning.
• Their exchanges reveal a shared fascination with how individuals become “shrunk into anecdotes,” and how retelling transforms truth.

Key Quotes:

“You become a set of anecdotes. Yes. And in our case, a lineup of books on a shelf.” — Julian Barnes (13:59)
“What if your brain didn’t just contain a chronological listing of all the pies you had eaten, but also of your moral actions and inactions... Not just the actual failings, but the imagined and desired ones.” — Julian Barnes reading from Departures (23:44)
“But perhaps presidents have a greater insight than the rest of us into the nature and magnanimity of the Godhead.” — Julian Barnes on Jimmy Carter’s confession (24:57)

4. Literary London of the 1970s: Then and Now

Timestamp: 29:05 - 32:19

• The conversation pivots to the literary landscape of their youth, before social media or book influencers—when a review in “the Listener or the Observer” could be make-or-break.
• Barnes challenges the myth of homogeneity in the literary scene, pointing to the genuine diversity of the 1983 “Best of Young British” list.
• They both offer anecdotes about intimidating literary parties, publishing circles, and the tangible sense of legacy (shelves of past titles at publishers’ offices).

Key Quotes:

“It was a smaller critical world.” — Julian Barnes (30:06)
“We were showing the way with diversity. Little did we know. We just thought, these are the good writers.” — Julian Barnes (30:48)

5. Structure and Re-Reading in Departures

Timestamp: 32:12 - 39:47

• McEwan offers a close reading of Departures, admiring its structure and the interplay of memory and metafiction; he describes Barnes stepping “through the mirror” from author to character.
• Both agree that structure in novels often becomes visible only upon re-reading, and the novelist’s architecture isn’t always pre-conceived but discovered in the process.
• The conversation underscores how novelist and narrator blur in the work, and how the writer’s life and fiction interweave.

Key Quotes:

“The point of the first few pages of a novel... is to make your reader confident that you know what you’re up to.” — Julian Barnes (38:21)
“Sometimes in interviews you feel you’re lying about yourself because you’re speaking about this book as if it was always intended.” — Ian McEwan (39:47)
“It might be a bit weedy to say it was just luck. But of course, it wasn’t luck sitting around.” — Julian Barnes (39:57)

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Notable & Memorable Moments

• Julian Barnes’ Recitation: His reading from Departures (19:27–25:06) is reflective, funny, and intellectually provocative, seamlessly shifting from literary anecdote to existential pondering.
• War Anecdote: The story of literary editor Terry Kilmartin being shot in the shoulder in WWII and realizing it only when smoke from his cigarette escaped through the wound (18:58) is a showstopper for its bizarre vividness.
• Reminiscence on Late Writers: Barnes and McEwan’s playful yet poignant back-and-forth about the supposed age limit for great writing (15:37) and how views shift as they themselves age.
• Friendship and Ribbing: Their episode is peppered with affectionate teasing, such as McEwan accusing Barnes’ characters of “sicker” early works, or Barnes denying his supposed confidence under his pseudonym.

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Timestamps for Key Segments

• Opening and Set-Up: 01:51 – 05:32
• Discussing Literary Beginnings: 05:33 – 09:34
• Surviving and Thriving in Literary London: 09:35 – 15:04
• On Memory, Death, and Anecdotes: 13:16 – 15:37
• Julian Reading from Departures: 19:27 – 25:06
• Then vs. Now: Changing Literary Culture: 29:05 – 32:19
• Deep Dive on Structure and Rereading: 32:12 – 39:47

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Conclusion

Tone & Spirit:
The conversation blends wry humor, warmth, intellectual rigor, and the comfort of shared history. Both Barnes and McEwan reflect not only on the work at hand but also on the legacy of writers, and the enduring questions of truth, memory, and artistic pleasure.

For Listeners:
Even without having read Departures, this episode invites you into the inner circle of British literary life, demystifying the often solitary act of writing and celebrating the joys (and foibles) of long creative friendships.

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End of Part One.
Stay tuned for further insights and stories in the next part of Julian Barnes and Ian McEwan’s live conversation.

Transcript

[Julian Barnes]

Close your eyes. Exhale. Feel your body relax and let go.

[Ian McEwan]

Of whatever you're carrying today.

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[Ian McEwan]

And breathe.

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[Narrator/Producer]

Namaste.

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[Ian McEwan]

So Julian, alone together at last.

[Julian Barnes]

True. Actually, this is the first time we've ever performed on stage together. Yeah, 50 years we've known one another 50 long years.

[Ian McEwan]

Never a cross word, never too late to start. So, by way of a little introduction, there's a time of year I used to hate and now I love it for all the same reasons. Everyone is just recovering from Christmas and getting ready to go through New Year. It's that dead time between Christmas and New Year. The winter blankets at its thickest, the days seem shorter than ever. And I was staring at my bookshelves knowing that I was coming to talk to Julian in three weeks time and he had announced that this was to be his last book. So. So I was pondering how it was that nearly 50 years could go by so quickly and the whole thing collapses into three and a half feet of shelf. And there it was. And I stared at it. They weren't in any order. My bookshelves are not quite that orderly. But there was Metroland and there was Departures and so much else in between. And I felt as if it was my own life, my own life as a reader. Going by many. Nearly all of the books are inscribed with love. Thank you very much, Julian. And I got a sense of the measure of your achievement and I felt absolutely thrilled. There you were with Bellow and Barthes and Beryl Bainbridge and Anita Bruckner. What is it with the bees?

[Julian Barnes]

Something with the bees is also something with the Max.

[Ian McEwan]

The Max, yeah.

[Julian Barnes]

They're pretty prolific as well.

[Ian McEwan]

Todd McEwen, whatever happened to him?

[Julian Barnes]

Yes.

[Ian McEwan]

So I felt a sense, really, I was looking at a lifetime, a lifetime of friendship, a lifetime of reading, and often more than once, and I felt quite indescribable pleasure. And I know that pleasure in these days of metaphysical doom is not really a subject, but my first sort of question is not even a question, it's a sort of talking. Point is to put to you, Julian, if you could summon for us writing pleasure, those moments, are they moments or those recapitulations that have given. Given you over nearly half a century, exquisite moments of happiness in the work. There was all the work in front of me. And my sense was that when Metroland came out, you were living in the house that you're still living in now, and there was such a consistency of purpose, and out of that purpose I got a real sense of writerly pleasure.

[Julian Barnes]

Yes. That's about three years out, but I was very shortly to move into the house where I still live. Yes. And books have taken over that house more and more. I had a. Well, I still have a snooker table, but at some point I started putting books on top of it. Yes. And then it became. And then I had a snooker injury in my rotator cuff injury. Very bad for snooker. And so it's just the snooker table's covered in books now. Most other surfaces are too.

[Ian McEwan]

And then tennis rackets.

[Julian Barnes]

Old broken tennis rackets. Yes. Yes. Old snooker cues. Yes. The past walking poles. Yes. Now I need them because I'm crooked in a different way. Yes. When did it all begin? I think it began in the Pillars of Hercules pub, when we were both circulating in London about 1974. 5. And we were. One of our early patrons was wonderful man, poet and critic called Ian Hamilton, who was extremely severe and sarky on the outside, but had a wonderfully soft heart. And you were there. And I was very relieved because I was reviewing fiction for the New Statesman and two weeks before I'd done a batch which included Ian McEwan, of whom I knew nothing and thank God I gave it a good review and it was. I can't remember who else was in the batch apart from Michael Cousteau. Do you remember him?

[Ian McEwan]

The name is me.

[Julian Barnes]

I think he ran the ica. Anyway, he wrote a very pretentious novel called King, which just happened to be the initial of his surname.

[Ian McEwan]

Very Kafkaesque.

[Julian Barnes]

Yes. And so we met and I think there was an election coming up and anyway, we didn't not get on.

[Ian McEwan]

We did not get on. But I still want to push you back to the notion of writing pleasure.

[Julian Barnes]

Yes.

[Ian McEwan]

What? Because I know that we waited, our bunch, or our lot as you call them, at some point in your departures, we'd all got our books out. When we were waiting for you.

[Julian Barnes]

I was aware that anyone was waiting for you.

[Ian McEwan]

We were waiting very impatiently. It came out in 1980.

[Julian Barnes]

Yeah, you published in 1974.

[Ian McEwan]

Martin 74, me 75. Then the poets, Craig Raine, Fenton, Christopher Reed, they were all spilling out onto the pavement. And what a delight it was because when it came, Metroland was an exquisite beginning. These rather nasty teenagers who broke all the rules of civility. They told each other that they wanted to marry a virgin, but in the meantime they were going to have lots of sex with lots of different girls. That old fashioned double standard.

[Julian Barnes]

I don't remember that at all.

[Ian McEwan]

No, right at the beginning maybe.

[Julian Barnes]

That's one of your early books.

[Ian McEwan]

No, no, no, you're not putting that one on me, mate.

[Julian Barnes]

Your early books are a lot sicker than mine, Ian.

[Ian McEwan]

Yeah, sicker than thou. Yes, but I'm not going to get any pleasure out. Any confessions of pleasure? There must have been a moment when you just knew that this is going to be your entire life and you were going to be very happy.

[Julian Barnes]

Well, I was laggardly in publishing my first novel, as you noticed, and I didn't have any sense that anyone was waiting for me to produce a novel. I'd been a journalist for I don't know how many years, 10, something like that, on and off. And you two, Ian and Martin seemed, you know, disappearing into the distance. I had little self confidence and you two seemed to have a lot of it. You probably didn't, but it was a good front.

[Ian McEwan]

Martin stole all the confidence as far as I can remember. Yeah, yeah.

[Julian Barnes]

Martin took the baton and just ran off with it.

[Ian McEwan]

You had a nom de plume which was shared around Edward Pig. Yes, rightly. Named, but spelled P Y double G E. And those spells when you were being Martin Pigg were so suave and sophisticated, I felt completely intimidated by you. So when you told someone recently that you were painfully shy and didn't speak up at editorial meetings at the News, that was completely new to me.

[Julian Barnes]

Oh, gosh.

[Ian McEwan]

I thought Edward Pig would hold his own anywhere.

[Julian Barnes]

Yeah, but when you're writing under a pseudonym, you can be much more self confident, cocky and down putting than if you've got your own name there.

[Ian McEwan]

You could be a pig.

[Julian Barnes]

Yeah, and also there's a tradition. Edward Pig was a creature, I think, put together by Ian Hamilton, John Fuller and someone else. And he appeared first of all in the Review and then in the New Review, and then he spread to the New Statesman and various people could be Edward Pig, but they really need my position permission. Anyway, he's now dead, so he had various colleagues. I reviewed a book of Robert Bresson's Pensee and it was reviewed by Edouard Pigeon. And then I remember our friend Russell Davis did something under the pseudonym of Edwina Pig. So it was just.

[Ian McEwan]

Spread around?

[Julian Barnes]

It was spread around, yes, generously.

[Ian McEwan]

At least half of that cast, maybe two thirds, are dead. And you write, I mean, the opening of Departures has the most splendid bit of investigation and speculation about the nature of memory. You think you have remembered something just so, and the more you have remembered it and retold it, the more you become convinced of its truth. And I feel that already having this conversation about the Pillars of Hercules. It's a pub in Greek Street. Upstairs was the editorial offices of the New Review. So the pub was really the saloon of that magazine, which was sort of loved and hated. People thought it was too expensive, it cost 75p.

[Julian Barnes]

And I remember a moment of great humiliation then in Hamilton, who I had not yet realized had a soft centre. In those days I didn't drink much and I didn't really know what I wanted to drink. I thought that wine tasted filthy and beer just made you want to go to the loo all the time. And so I drank gin and bitter lemon. Of course, bitter lemon tasted nice and meant you couldn't taste the gin. So I was at the bar with Ian and he in his masculinest way, had ordered a pint of bitter and whiskey chaser or whiskey avec, I don't know. And they said, what would you like? And I said, tin bit of lemon. He said, he'll have a gin. And you say it.

[Ian McEwan]

Yeah.

[Julian Barnes]

And I said, it's a lemon.

[Ian McEwan]

So yes, People, the dead especially, shrinking into anecdotes. Because, as you have noted, because the parallel story, of course, was Ian was at the bar getting us all gin and tonic, and someone said, I can't possibly drink a gin and tonic at quarter to 11 in the morning. And Ian said, you're not meant to like it.

[Julian Barnes]

Yes.

[Ian McEwan]

So if you want to ask yourself what happens after death, you become an anecdote, if you're lucky.

[Julian Barnes]

Yes. You become a set of anecdotes. Yes. And in our case, a lineup of books on a shelf.

[Ian McEwan]

Because in my memory, and by the way, we will get to serious business of the book in question. In my memory, there were two centres for us across London. The New Statesman, once you started editing it, the Back half, the Literary Half, the Arts pages with Martin and the Friday Lunches, Mark Box. These names, many of them, will not mean much to you. Martin, of course, Clive James.

[Julian Barnes]

Terrence Kilmartin.

[Ian McEwan]

Terence Kilmartin. So all of those dead, just you, me and Russell Davis, really, I think, left Pierce.

[Julian Barnes]

Paul Reid is still alive. Yeah, I met him the other day and I said, you're looking very good for 90. And he said, I'm not 90. We don't get less touchy as we get older.

[Ian McEwan]

Well, on that, my literary agent in New York, on his birthday a couple of years ago, wrote to me and I wrote, said, happy birthday. And he said very wistfully in his email, oh, to be 90 again. He was 97. So every time you turn one of those sort of cornerstones or monuments. 40, 50, 60, 70, just remember that there are still people pining to be 90.

[Julian Barnes]

I remember Martin always used to say, no one wrote anything good after they were 60, which he rather stopped saying as he carried on publishing. And then as I've been reading, as you doubtless have, the Updike letters. Yes. And there's one letter where he says, maybe writers should stop at 70. Yeah, but no, no, no, but now I say writers should stop, and some do stop at 80. So you've got another three years.

[Ian McEwan]

I remember when you famously said that the Booker Prize was posh bingo. You changed your mind on that, and I can't remember why.

[Julian Barnes]

No, no, no, no. Memory, memory. What I actually said was the only way for writers to stay sane is to treat it as posh bingo.

[Ian McEwan]

History has edited that.

[Julian Barnes]

I know history has edited. Now I say it's posh bingo. And actually, I don't really mind because it sounds. Sounds Booker Prize. But I also remember you saying around the time you said you've now won the Booker Prize. So that means you will forever be introduced as Julian Barnes, winner of the Booker Prize. You had been Ian McKeown, winner of the Booker Prize for about 15 years or something like that by then.

[Ian McEwan]

Also when you get run over by a bus. Booker Prize winner.

[Julian Barnes]

Yes. Hosed off the street.

[Ian McEwan]

So we were lucky. They weren't father figures, but avuncular figures in London in the 70s. And I think they took rather good care of us. I made a little list here. John Kerry, Carl Miller, Frank Cumod, Terry Kilmartin, Alavares, Malcolm Bradbury. I think we were very lucky to have such highly literate, serious people looking over our shoulder.

[Julian Barnes]

Yes, I mean, that's certainly true. About half that list is certainly true of me. Especially Terry Kilmartin, you know, he's the most modest man, most brilliant man. And he. By day he edited the Observer Books pages. And then he went home and carried on retranslating Proust. I don't feel. There aren't any literary editors in the audience. I feel that weight. Perhaps.

[Ian McEwan]

Softly spoken, gentle man.

[Julian Barnes]

Yes.

[Ian McEwan]

Now he's shrunk into an anecdote.

[Julian Barnes]

Yes, I've got a very.

[Ian McEwan]

Please tell him about.

[Julian Barnes]

Very good anecdote about Terr Martin. He was.

[Ian McEwan]

Turn my phone off.

[Julian Barnes]

There was a party he was at and Edna o' Brien was there and they were arguing. At a certain point Chase said, oh, fuck off. Edna stormed out of the house, slammed the door, got into the street and realized he'd walked out of his own house.

[Ian McEwan]

Okay, there's one more Terry Kumartin anecdote about some terrible moment in the. In the war when he got shot in the shoulder.

[Julian Barnes]

He was shot in the shoulder?

[Ian McEwan]

Yes.

[Julian Barnes]

Carry on.

[Ian McEwan]

He thought he'd have.

[Julian Barnes]

That's not the punchline?

[Ian McEwan]

No. He thought, well, no, it won't be so bad. And I'll just stand here and have a cigarette. And after he had inhaled, he saw the smoke coming out of his throat. And then he realized he was seriously injured.

[Julian Barnes]

Can I read something?

[Ian McEwan]

Yes, please.

[Julian Barnes]

Good. I was looking for a cue, but I didn't get it in it.

[Ian McEwan]

No, you didn't deserve it.

[Julian Barnes]

I feel sure that you all want me to read from my book at this point. And we are obviously going to talk about memory and its fallibility and its oddities. And so I'm going to read you a couple of pages from the very start of my book which introduces the concept of IAMs, which are involuntary autobiographical memories. And I have a friend who's a consultant radiologist who's known as Dr. Jackie, and she for years has been sending me clippings from the British Medical Journal. She knows my taste for the obscure and slightly weird. The most recent clipping sent by Dr. Jackie had appropriate enough a literary heading Proust and Madeleine together in the Thalamus. Naturally, I read on. Madeleine, you will recall, was not the love of Proust's life, but a biscuit that, when dropped into tea, created an involuntary autobiographical memory. An iam. The report's source was the journal Neurology, Clinical Practice and its subject, a 45 year old man who'd suffered a left posterothalamic hemorrhagic stroke. The consequences were much more extreme and particular than the gentle jolt Proust received from a Madeleine. The patient disclosed that, quote, tasting apple pie would trigger memories of all the pies he had ever tasted. They would be experienced in proper chronology and would rush into his mind like a cascade. My first reaction was one of alarm. Imagine such high speed assaults by forgotten memories, a historic avalanche roaring across your perception of the present, tearing up your very sense of yourself. And as a friend pointed out, what if the triggering experience was not as life affirming as eating an apple piece? What he said. If you farted, however quietly, and were then presented in chronological order with every single fart you had ever let loose, and so on, you can provide your own examples without difficulty. Imagine the exhausting thought or sight of a few thousand bacon sandwiches flashing through your consciousness, and would their quality and difference, plus your reactions to them, be replayed as well? My second reaction was more considered and more rightly IAMs would certainly help with autobiography. You think you have remembered something just so, and the more times you've remembered it and retold it, the more times you become convinced of its truth. But what if you're pulled up and corrected by your own brain? What if it could lay in front of you, all your retellings, and demonstrate how gradually, systematically, you had diverged from your original account? Wouldn't that be weird and disorienting, yet also helpful? You could hardly overrule your own thalamus, could you? And what if your brain didn't just contain a chronological listing of all the pies you had eaten, but also of your moral actions and inactions? Every time you said I love you, whether you meant it or not, every time you failed to say I love you when you should have done, when you wanted to but failed, how would you face the record, the chronological record of all your lies, hypocrisies, cruelties, both avoidable and seemingly unavoidable. Your harsh forgettings, your dissimulations, your broken promises, your infidelities of word and deed. Not just the actual failings, but the imagined and desired ones. Remember President Jimmy Carter's celebrated interview about lust with Playboy magazine, in which he boldly confessed that I've committed adultery in my heart many times. We've most of us done that while tending to retain in our conscious memories only the more charming and less guilt inducing of our fantasies. But what about those more embarrassing, inadmissible, sluttish adulteries of a heart which which we have chosen to suppress? There was a second part to President Carter's famous admission, which strikes me as even bolder. After confessing his dream sins, he went on this is something God recognizes that I will do, and I have done it, and God forgives me for it. This seems to a non believer more than a little smug. Not only will the Almighty forgive Jimmy Carter at the final judgment, but he is forgiving him as he goes along each time his adulterous heart throbs. But perhaps presidents have a greater insight than the rest of us into the nature and magnanimity of the Godhead.

[Ian McEwan]

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[Ian McEwan]

Just want to linger one little moment. In the 70s, do you think we had it a lot easier without the Internet, without social media, without book influencers, when all that mattered when you published a book was what the Listener said or the Observer?

[Julian Barnes]

Yes. I don't know. I mean, one of the things you want is comeback. And I suppose nowadays you can get come back from all sorts of directions.

[Ian McEwan]

All sorts of people.

[Julian Barnes]

Whereas if you were savaged in the Listener by Derwent May. Derwent May or Hans Keller, for example. Right. There's certain people there who, if you saw their names on the byline, you.

[Ian McEwan]

Thought, oh no, it wasn't going to be good.

[Julian Barnes]

It was a smaller critical world. Yes.

[Ian McEwan]

And it was populated by boys and men.

[Julian Barnes]

Well, yes and no. I mean, I'm often brought up and even presented with the photograph evidence of the famous 1983 Best of Young British and the sort of semi myth that it was all white English boys. It wasn't. It was the most diverse list that there has ever been. And subsequent lists have been much less diverse. You know, Thuis there Wasama Rushdie, there was Shiva Nai Paul as Buki Emichetta, as Kashir Ishiguro. There are about five or six women. And so we were showing the way with diversity. Little did we know. We just thought, these are the good writers that these people have chosen.

[Ian McEwan]

I'm glad you rescued the seventies for us there. The publishing houses, on the other hand, and the literary pages were much more clubbable than men. And my sense of it was the first time I went to my publisher's office, which was in Bedford Square, Tom Mashler. And he kept me waiting a long time. And I stood in his office and I went to look at his bookshelves and looked at all the books published by Jonathan Cape. And I must have been looking for two minutes before I saw a single name that I recognized. And it gave me a sense of the writerly death. Maybe I was. Maybe I thought, maybe this is a kiss of death. Publisher, am I in the right place?

[Julian Barnes]

Well, it didn't turn out to be that, did it?

[Ian McEwan]

No, just life.

[Julian Barnes]

I mean, we're both Cape authors. We've both been gay authors for approximately 50 years.

[Ian McEwan]

Boytown, I think, was Martin's nice word for it. But anyway, before talking to you tonight, I reread Departures, and I think I said to you in a note.

[Julian Barnes]

How.

[Ian McEwan]

Much I admired its structure. Now, I think structure is an almost invisible element. First time you read a novel. But I had this very strong sense. So you read from this wonderful and rather startling open on memory, its unreliability above all. You then announce in that same section that this is your last book. And at that point I thought, I don't believe this, because this is not Julian Barnes. This is Julian Barnes. This is a narrator. So already, structurally, I'm now reading this as if through a gauze of irony. Then your story begins a story that doesn't have a middle. It has a beginning and it has an ending as you frame it. And you evoke your time at university, Oxford Magdalen, unlike my university, had a deer park and snake's head frittery growing on the banks of the Cherwell. Still, you were complaining about it, but anyway, and your two friends that you quite instrumental in bringing together Stephen and Jean and your role in that. And then that stops. And then a rather dramatic reflection on illness and death. And partly, I'm saying this too, because many people here will not have read this novel. If we're going to talk about it, I'm going to give nothing away. I'm only going to talk about it.

[Julian Barnes]

So just make it sound appetizing. Yeah.

[Ian McEwan]

And then brilliantly and compellingly, You talk about the radioactive or radiative effects of grief, about which, tragically, you know, a fair bit. And then we come to, I think, the most remarkable bit of this novel. We jump 40 years. Stephen and Jean, who had split apart after their university years were over and they want to get back together. And Julian Barnes, or Julian Barnes, is instrumental in arranging this in the very same place, the covered market in Oxford, in the very same caf. And then comes what I think is a piece of modern postmodern, post postmodern fictional magic. How's my. Is it doing all right now?

[Julian Barnes]

So far so good. Okay.

[Ian McEwan]

The relationship so rekindling. We learn from Julian or Julian, they are rekindlers. And I looked it up. Six percent of marriages end up in remarriages in the uk, but they were never married. So we don't quite know what the figures for that would be. But anyway, they come separately to your or your house to talk through their problems with each other. And you try to keep a neutral, friendly tone and advise them. And I thought, this is Julian. Now, this is a great look back through your work because the sense of someone investigating the real world and talking about it as an author and the characters often blend, sometimes step on each other's toes. But here it seems you've stepped through a mirror, you've assembled your two characters. They've come to see you. They've come to ask for your advice. You seem to step through the mirror into your fiction. And they're stepping out of the mirror, as it were, into your world. So I have to compliment each other. I think it was the cleverest damn thing I've read in a very long time. Compelling, haunting. And then Part Five. And we can reflect on the number five. Maybe we've read so many Shakespeare plays that things fall into threes or they fall into fives. A marvelous reflection on death time. And by which time we are completely convinced that you really mean it. This Julian Barnes does not have hyphens around it. It is not an ironic poem, piece of distancing. This is really you. At which point we realize that Stephen and Jean are not characters from your past. They are completely imaginary. So I have to congratulate you on this. And just to lead somewhere so serious about this, I want to ask you about rereading. I have a re. Reading. Yes, I have a sense of your great rereader, which is what brings me back to structure. The delight of rereading a book, especially one that is not too far back in your past, is when its architecture becomes apparent to you. And writers spend so much time on their architecture and it's unobserved, as it were. But with the rereading, we see it as it were for the first time.

[Julian Barnes]

I think that's true, yes. I mean, we start reading books for their character and plot and sort of feel conf. Well, as long as the point of the first few pages of a novel, it seems to me, is to make your reader confident that you know what you're up to. And if there are things that they don't get or understand, these will be explained at some future point. This is a giving of confidence on both sides. And the thing about. You know, I remember when I was at school and we were taught about the novel and there was sort of theme, there was structure, there was tone, there was this, there was that. And I somehow assumed that, you know, the novelist sort of ticked off this and ticked off that and. And somehow he knew what the overall. He or she knew what the overall form was from the beginning. And in my experience, that's not the case, that often the form comes with the writing and the sort of. Also, the other thing is, this is in brackets. But I don't know if it's your experience, but when I finished a novel, I'd forgotten all the sort of false trails, all the ways it could. Could have gone and didn't. And then it's a way of making yourself confident that you've got it to its final stage. And it's irrelevant to think about whether this or that had happened.

[Ian McEwan]

Which is why sometimes in interviews you feel you're lying about yourself because you're speaking about this book as if it was always intended.

[Julian Barnes]

Yes, yes, yes, exactly. And, well, it might be a bit weedy to say it was just luck. It just turned out this way. But of course, it wasn't luck sitting around.

[Narrator/Producer]

Yes, thanks for listening to Intelligence Squared. This episode was produced by Ginny Hooker and it was edited by Mark Roberts. For ad free episodes and full length recordings, you can become a [e-mail] membership and to join us at future live events, head over to intelligencesquared.com attend to see our full events program. You've been listening to Intelligence Squared. Thanks for joining us.

[Ian McEwan]

Hi everybody, it's Andy and James here.

[Julian Barnes]

From your next favorite podcast, no Such.

[Ian McEwan]

Thing as a Fish. That's right, we do fun facts.

[Julian Barnes]

Yes, we do.

[Ian McEwan]

James, give me a fact. Did you know that there is an extinct bandicoot whose official scientific name is Crash Bandicoot? Lovely.

[Julian Barnes]

I didn't know that.

[Ian McEwan]

Did you know, James, that Upper Egypt is technically below Lower Egypt? Incredible. Absolutely amazing. I would love to hear more about that.

[Julian Barnes]

Well, all you have to do is.

[Ian McEwan]

Go and listen to no Such Thing as a Fish. Where will I find it?

[Julian Barnes]

Oh, all over.

[Ian McEwan]

Okay, bye. Bye.

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