He never submitted his final essay, instead asking Elizabeth, whose hauteur arouses much intrigue among her students, out to lunch. The essay’s author is the book’s narrator, Neil, a twice-divorced soap actor turned mushroom grower, who writes in memory of Elizabeth Finch, a lecturer who taught a year-long evening class he attended in London on the subject of “culture and civilisation”. His new novel, riddling to the point of reader-denying, devotes a third of its short length to a 50-page essay on historical views of the Roman emperor Julian the Apostate, who was thwarted in his attempt to ditch Christianity and return Rome to pagan worship. J ulian Barnes has always enjoyed blurring the boundaries between fiction and nonfiction, writing novels that sound like works of history or criticism.
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