Early life
Barnes was born in Leicester, in the East Midlands of England, on 19 January 1946, although his family moved to the outer suburbs of London six weeks afterwards. [3] [4] Both of his parents were French teachers. [3] [1] He has said that his support for Leicester City Football Club was, aged four or five, "a sentimental way of hanging on" to his home city. [4] At the age of 10, Barnes was told by his mother that he had "too much imagination". [3]
In 1956, the family moved to Northwood, Middlesex, the "Metroland" of his first novel. [3] He was educated at the City of London School from 1957 to 1964. He then went on to Magdalen College, Oxford, where he studied modern languages. [5] After graduation, he worked for three years as a lexicographer for the Oxford English Dictionary supplement. [5] He then worked as a reviewer and literary editor for the New Statesman and the New Review. [5] During his time at the New Statesman, Barnes suffered from debilitating shyness, about which he has said: "When there were weekly meetings I would be paralysed into silence, and was thought of as the mute member of staff." [3] From 1979 to 1986, he worked as a television critic, first for the New Statesman and then for The Observer . [5]
Career
His first novel, Metroland , published in 1980, is the story of Christopher, a young man from the London suburbs who travels to Paris, France, as a student, finally returning to London. The novel deals with themes of idealism and sexual fidelity, and has the three-part structure that is a common recurrence in Barnes's work. After reading the novel, Barnes's mother complained about the book's "bombardment" of filth. [3]
His second novel, Before She Met Me (1982), features a darker narrative, a story of revenge by a jealous historian who becomes obsessed with his second wife's past. Barnes's breakthrough novel Flaubert's Parrot (1984) departed from the traditional linear structure of his previous novels and featured a fragmentary biographical-style story of an elderly doctor, Geoffrey Braithwaite, who focuses obsessively on the life of Gustave Flaubert. About Flaubert, Barnes has said, "he's the writer whose words I most carefully tend to weigh, who I think has spoken the most truth about writing." [6] Flaubert's Parrot was published to great acclaim, especially in France, and it helped establish Barnes as a serious literary figure when the novel was shortlisted for the Booker Prize. [7]
Staring at the Sun followed in 1986, another ambitious novel about a woman growing to maturity in post-war England and dealing with issues of love, truth and mortality. In 1989, Barnes published A History of the World in 10½ Chapters , which is also a non-linear novel, and uses a variety of writing styles to call into question the perceived notions of human history and knowledge itself.
During the 1980s, Barnes wrote four crime novels under the name "Dan Kavanagh" (Barnes had recently married the literary agent Pat Kavanagh). [8] The novels centred around the main character Duffy, a former police detective turned security advisor. Duffy is notable because he represents one of Britain's first bisexual male detectives. Barnes has said the use of a pseudonym is "liberating in that you could indulge any fantasies of violence you might have". [9] While Metroland, also published in 1980, took Barnes eight years to write, Duffy and the rest of the Kavanagh novels typically took less than two weeks each to put to paper—an experiment to test "what it would be like writing as fast as I possibly could in a concentrated way". [10]
During the 1990s, Barnes wrote several additional novels and works of journalism. In 1991, he published Talking It Over , about a contemporary love triangle, in which the three characters take turns to talk to the reader, reflecting on common events. This was followed by a sequel published in 2000 called Love, etc , which revisited the characters ten years on. [11] Barnes's novel The Porcupine (1992) again deals with a historical theme as it depicts the trial of Stoyo Petkanov, the former leader of a collapsed Communist country in Eastern Europe, as he stands trial for crimes against his country. England, England (1998) is a humorous novel that explores the idea of national identity as the entrepreneur Sir Jack Pitman creates a theme park on the Isle of Wight that resembles some of the tourist spots of England. Barnes is a keen Francophile, and his 1996 book, Cross Channel , is a collection of 10 stories charting Britain's relationship with France. [1] He also returned to the topic of France in Something to Declare, a collection of essays on French subjects.
In 2003, Barnes undertook a rare acting role as the voice of Georges Simenon in a BBC Radio 4 series of adaptations of Inspector Maigret stories. [12] Arthur & George (2005), a fictional account of a true crime that was investigated by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, launched Barnes's career into the more popular mainstream. It was the first of his novels to be featured on The New York Times bestsellers list for Hardback Fiction.
Barnes's 11th novel, The Sense of an Ending , published by Jonathan Cape, was released on 4 August 2011. [13] In October of that year, the book was awarded the Man Booker Prize. [14] The judges took 31 minutes to decide the winner and head judge, Stella Rimington, said that The Sense of an Ending was a "beautifully written book" and the panel thought it "spoke to humankind in the 21st Century." [14] [15] The Sense of an Ending also won the Europese Literatuurprijs and was on the New York Times Bestseller list for several weeks.
In 2013, Barnes published Levels of Life . The first section of the work gives a history of early ballooning and aerial photography, describing the work of Gaspard-Félix Tournachon. The second part is a short story about Fred Burnaby and the French actor Sarah Bernhardt, both also balloonists. The third part is an essay discussing Barnes's grief over the death of his wife, Pat Kavanagh (although she is not named): "You put together two people who have not been put together before . . . Sometimes it works, and something new is made, and the world is changed . . . I was thirty-two when we met, sixty-two when she died. The heart of my life; the life of my heart." [16] In The Guardian , Blake Morrison said of the third section: "Its resonance comes from all it doesn't say, as well as what it does; from the depth of love we infer from the desert of grief." [17]
In 2013, Barnes took on the British government over its "mass closure of public libraries", Britain's "slip down the world league table for literacy" and its "ideological worship of the market – as quasi-religious as nature-worship – and an ever-widening gap between rich and poor". [18]
