The Booker prize-winning author, Julian Barnes, has confirmed his new novel, Departure(s), will be his last book, saying that he has the sense “that I’ve played all my tunes”.
Barnes, who celebrates his 80th birthday on Monday and whose works over a 45-year career include 15 novels and 10 works of nonfiction, said: “One way of thinking about how long you go on is, ‘As long as they’ll still publish you’.
“But that can be misleading. I shouldn’t write a book just because it would be published. You ought to go on until you’ve said everything you’ve got to say, and I’ve reached that point.
“I won’t stop writing, because I’ve been a journalist all my life, before I became a novelist. So I shall do journalism, reviews and things like that. But in terms of books, this is my last,” he told the Telegraph.
Departures(s), which centres on his role as go-between for two anonymised friends, Stephen and Jean, who became lovers but then separated, has been described as a hybrid of memoir, essay and fiction, bringing together many of the themes of Barnes’s work, including memory, love, friendship, ageing and death.
The author, who was diagnosed six years ago with a rare type of blood cancer which is managed by taking chemotherapy in pill form daily, said of his illness: “Right now, it’s a score draw.”
He added: “But as long as it continues to be stable, it just contributes to a weakening of the organism. And I’m just used to it,” he said.
Widowed aged 62 when his wife, the literary agent Pat Kavanagh, died from a brain tumour in 2008, Barnes recently revealed he had secretly remarried last August to Rachel Cugnoni, a publisher he had known for almost 30 years and who had been his partner for the past eight years.
His first novel, Metroland, was published in 1980 but his breakthrough came in 1984 with his third book, Flaubert’s Parrot, which was shortlisted for the Booker prize. He was shortlisted twice more, for England, England and Arthur & George, before winning the Booker for The Sense of an Ending in 2011. He also writes crime fiction under the name Dan Kavanagh.
He told the Telegraph: “I’ve led a lucky life. If you’d told me when I was 30 I’d write lots of books which a lot of people like to read, I’d have been staggered. So I’m very pleased about that.”
Asked if he feared death, Barnes, an avowed atheist, replied: “I used to be terrified of death, but after spending about 10 years with a body falling apart or not behaving well, I don’t feel resigned to it. But it’s obviously different when you die in your 80s from dying in your 40s or 50s. But losing your life when you’re just holding on … who can tell?”
