Heaven, in Julian Barnes’s 1989 novel A History of the World in 10½ Chapters, is a place of boundless luxury where your every wish is granted. You can sleep with a different film star every night, hole-in-one every time at golf, score 750 not out against Australia at Lords – or you can choose annihilation. And sooner or later, out of sheer boredom, everyone chooses that. Barnes’s fable seems meant to convey how unbearable eternal life would be, so it comes as a shock to find, from his new book, that actually he thinks just the opposite. Terror of death has tormented him as long as he can remember. He wakes in the night, beating the pillow with his fist and shouting, “Oh no Oh No OH NO.” Nor is it just senility and the pain of dying that frighten him, as they do most people. It is the idea of annihilation, of not existing any more, that makes him shiver.

He quite sees that this is unreasonable. It does not worry us to think that we did not exist before we were born, so why should we fear not existing after our death? Seneca, who first pointed this out, has been failing to convince death-fearers for 2,000 years, and he fails to convince Barnes. The time before his birth was different, he protests, because then the universe was labouring to produce “something of decided interest”, namely, him. After his death, it will have no such purpose. Only joking? Well, yes and no. His book is, designedly, a maze of doubt, where questions are raised, dropped, and brought back looking different. Stirred into the mix are cagey fragments of autobiography, with his adult life and marriage omitted, and friends’ names hidden behind initials. Allusions to musicians, artists and writers abound, especially French ones, and ones whose horror of death matches, or even outdoes, his own.

He finds a kind of alter ego in Jules Renard, the 19th-century French author who said. “I don’t know if God exists, but it would be better for his reputation if he didn’t.” Barnes used to be an atheist but is now an agnostic. He sometimes catches himself defending God against stupid and ignorant detractors. “I don’t believe in God, but I miss him,” he admits — a perfect summary of the modern western predicament. He rightly insists that you would have to be very foolish to suppose that the generations who believed in God were less intelligent than you. Besides, religion gave life seriousness. Without it, it is just an ephemeral natural occurrence, like the weather. The more he goes on, the more you feel he would make rather a good priest — a bit austere perhaps, but that would add to his gravitas, and the church could certainly do with his brains. He says that he has had one, or possibly two, out-of-body experiences, which is surely a good start, and he feels it would be “distinctly interesting” to talk to saints in the afterlife, if there were one. Perhaps, if he had taken holy orders, he would have been canonised himself.

There is even something reminiscent of the church fathers in the way he fixes on the decay of the human body. The church fathers did it to raise the mind to God. Why Barnes does it is not so clear, but it seems to be something to do with his ruthless writerly integrity. He describes his father’s long decline, his difficulties with the Zimmer frame, the day he urinated by mistake on his electric razor. He describes his mother going batty and saying ridiculous things. Is it “indecent”, he asks, to dwell on his parents’ decline — one of the many questions he leaves unanswered. The coldness that pervades his writing is perhaps genetic. Tender emotions do not seem to have thrived in the Barnes family. He was taken aback to find that a leather pouffe he had often sat on was stuffed with the torn-up letters his parents had written to each other in their courtship and early marriage.

Relations with his elder brother were not ideal. They travelled on the Tube to school every day for four years, and in all that time his brother would not only refuse to sit in the same compartment, he would not even take the same train. A game he enjoyed was to blindfold his younger brother, seat him on a tricycle, and push him into a wall. He is now a university professor of philosophy. Barnes relates these facts without rancour, expressing admiration for his brother’s intellect, while intimating, in the nicest possible way, that he is a bore and a pedant. Just in case we should be in any doubt, he adds that he goes around in 18th-century dress — knee breeches, brocade waistcoat, buckled shoes.

Religion was unknown in the family. His mother was an atheist, his father an agnostic. Apart from weddings and funerals, he has never been to a church service. He now fears he missed something, and that it impairs his understanding of religious art. (This may be true: he seems to think Bernini’s ecstasy of St Teresa depicts

St Thérèse of Lisieux, who was born 200 years after Bernini’s death). For him, aesthetic rapture has had to replace religious rapture, and he can see that has its drawbacks. For one thing, the immortality art offers, unlike that offered by religion, is bogus. All art will be forgotten eventually. For another, aesthetic rapture may be simulated. One of his heroes is Stendhal, who recalled, in 1826, that when he first went to Florence he swooned on seeing the Giottos in Santa Croce. It has made him “the modern art-lover’s progenitor and justification”, and his swoon has been recognised by psychologists as a special kind of arty faint called Stendhal’s Syndrome. But it seems it never happened. Barnes finds no mention of it in Stendhal’s original 1811 diary of the Florence trip.

All the same, he counts the great artists and writers as his real family. They are his “ancestors” and his “true blood line”. It seems a trifle presumptuous. How, one wonders, would Jane Austen and Evelyn Waugh, two of his chosen relatives, respond to being made honorary Barneses? It seems unfair, too, to his actual family. The most admirable people in the book are his maternal grandparents. Grandma was a communist, took the Daily Worker, and expertly pickled and bottled the produce grandpa raised. He had fought on the Western front with the Lancashire Fusiliers, and grew his own tobacco as well as rearing geese and chickens. Why should these two sterling characters be considered inherently inferior and less worthy to be Barnes’s progenitors, than, say, Shostakovich and Rachmaninov? Yet that is the conclusion Barnes’s aesthetic creed enforces. Ironically, the most mind-expanding idea in his book comes not from the arts but from science. He quotes Martin Rees, the astronomer royal, to the effect that our sun is less than halfway through its lifespan. It still has six billion years to go. By that time human life will be extinct, and any creatures left on earth “will be as different from us as we are from bacteria and amoebae”. So much for immortal art.

NOTHING TO BE FRIGHTENED OF by Julian Barnes
Cape £17.99 pp250

Julian Barnes is at the Sunday Times Oxford Literary Festival, on Sunday, April 6, at 6pm. For tickets, call 0870 343 1001.

Nothing To Be Frightened Of is available at the Books First price of £15.29 (including p&p) on 0870 165 8585

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