“The end of our course,” wrote Montaigne, “is death. It is the objective necessarily within our sights. If death frightens us how can we go one step forward without anguish?”

In his latest book, Nothing to be Frightened of, Julian Barnes describes how he nearly met his own end untimely while visiting Montaigne's tower near Bordeaux. Paying homage at a vantage point above a steep staircase off the sage's third-storey bedroom: “I slipped, and in an instant found myself splayed and sprung against the side walls, trying to prevent myself being shot down this stone funnel into the chapel below”.

Having cheated death on Montaigne's staircase, Barnes continues to follow the great sceptic's admonition to keep it in mind. Asked by a friend how often he thinks about death: “At least once each waking day, I replied...Mortality often gatecrashes my consciousness when the outside world presents an obvious parallel: as evening falls, as the days shorten, or towards the end of a long day's hiking. A little more originally, perhaps, my wake-up call frequently shrills at the start of a sports event on television, especially, for some reason, during the Five (now Six) Nations rugby tournament.” To which the friend responds, “Your death-thoughts seem HEALTHY...Mine are v.v. sicko.”

The extent to which any discussion of death can be characterised, these days, as “healthy” is one of the questions addressed by Julian Barnes in this intensely fascinating volume. “People used to talk more readily about...death and extinction,” he writes. In the 1920s Sibelius used to join the “lemon table” at the Kamp restaurant in Helsinki, at which (the lemon being the Chinese symbol of death), “he and his fellow diners were not just permitted, but required to talk about death.” One problem, reflects Barnes, with gathering a new lemon table might be the setting-in of an unseemly spirit of competitiveness among the diners. “Why should mortality be less a matter for male boasting than cars, income, women, cock size?”

The thought of a tableful of contemporary authors comparing the size, frequency and intensity of their respective death-dreads over caneton à la presse and lemon sorbet is certainly arresting, but let us return for a moment to the prudishness that characterizes much of modern discourse about death, for a mild case of it seems to afflict Barnes's publisher when describing his book. It is (says the blurb) “among many things, a family memoir, an exchange with his brother, a meditation on mortality, a celebration of art, an argument with and about God, and a homage to the French writer Jules Renard”.

Nothing here is untrue (and the job of the blurb writer in trying to summarise the work in a couple of upbeat sentences is unenviable). It's just that the description makes the book sound like a selection box of sweeties in which the hovering hand of the reader might eschew the unattractive hazelnut cluster of God and Death and light instead upon the strawberry creme of family memoir, artistic celebration or literary reverie.

Fanciers of such soft-centred stuff are in for a surprise: “This is not, by the way, ‘my autobiography'. Nor am I ‘in search of my parents',” Barnes warns (note the astringent internal quotation marks). “Part of what I'm doing ... is trying to work out how dead they are.” And the rest of what he's doing is trying to work out how dead everyone else is. Especially himself.

This is not, in short, a book about family'n'God'n'art'n'books'n'Jules's very clever and rather crushing bro, the quaintly dressed, llama-owning, France-dwelling philosopher. It is a meditation on death, in the contemplation of which all the above, and a good deal else beside, are intimately involved. “How is it best to write about illness, and dying, and death?” Barnes asks in the introduction to his translation of In The Land of Pain, Alphonse Daudet's notebook of his mortal illness. He offers the example of Turgenev, who, during an abdominal operation in which he remained conscious, “tried to find the right words to convey exactly the sense of the steel slicing through my sin and entering my body...It was like a knife cutting into a banana”.

This splitting of consciousness, the calm(-ish) examination of extinction, while proceeding steadily towards it (Barnes is 62 and, as far as one can tell from his non-autobiography, in fair health) is what interests him. He quotes the novelist and diarist Jules Renard, who endured the deaths of his father, brother and mother before his own early demise and remarked: “It is when faced with death that we turn most bookish.”

This is, sure enough, an extremely bookish account of mortality: intricate and elegantly structured beneath its anecdotal surface (though Barnes resists the notion of life as a narrative with death as its conclusion, regarding it as a nostrum devised by a conspiracy of “doctors, priests and novelists”). It may also strike female readers as a peculiarly male account of timor mortis. The sensation of dying a little at the prospect of sport on the telly, for example, seems outlandish to Barnes, but may be quite familiar to at least part of his female audience.

And it is instructive to compare Nothing to be Frightened of with Diana Athill's recent memoir, Somewhere Towards the End, in which the 90-year-old author, half as old again as Barnes, writes in beautiful detail about being very old, but dismisses in a single crisp sentence - “I have found it easy to think myself into a reasonable attitude towards death” - the very experience, le reveil mortel, of which Barnes's book is an extended anatomy.

“If death frightens us, how can we go one step forward without anguish?” Barnes proposes no answer but, like Turgenev, Daudet or Renard, keeps a close eye on his timor mortis, observing the appearance of the dead body, the mutilated photograph in the family album, the words carved on the neglected headstone, the fat worm strutting along the edge of the open grave - as though by fine observation he might cheat the extinguishing power of death. Which, after all, he might, for a bit. At least until the moment in the distant future when the very last reader returns his book to the library and turns on the telly instead.

Nothing to be Frightened of, by Julian Barnes
Cape, £16.99

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