Departure(s)

Julian Barnes, the British novelist and essayist, opens his final book with a medical curiosity. His friend Dr. Jacky, a consultant radiologist, sends him a clipping about involuntary autobiographical memory, or IAM, a phenomenon in which sensory triggers provoke cascading, chronological recollections. The case involves a 45-year-old man who, nine months after a stroke in his thalamus, found that tasting apple pie triggered memories of every pie he had ever eaten, arriving in sequence.

Barnes, now in his mid-seventies, finds this both alarming and fascinating. He considers the implications for autobiography: If the brain could lay out every version of a memory one has ever told, it could expose how gradually one had diverged from the original. He raises a moral dimension, asking what it would mean to confront a chronological record of every lie, cruelty, and broken promise. He connects the acronym IAM to "I AM" and to "The Great I AM," the Christian God who was believed to remember every human action, suggesting that IAMs represent a secularized, pre-death version of the Last Judgement, with the individual as both subject and judge.

From here, Barnes examines historical cases of extraordinary memory, including A. R. Luria's famous study of "S," a Soviet-era professional mnemonist whose total recall, combined with synaesthesia (a condition in which one sensory experience triggers another), made ordinary life nearly impossible. He then turns to Marcel Proust's famous madeleine episode from À la Recherche du temps perdu, in which the narrator tastes tea-soaked cake and is flooded with childhood memories. Barnes offers a skeptical reading: The process Proust describes, he argues, is not truly involuntary but semi-voluntary, requiring considerable effort of will. He confesses he has never experienced such a transcendental memory himself. He traces the intellectual origins of Proust's ideas, challenging the standard attribution to philosopher Henri Bergson and pointing instead to neurologist Paul Sollier, at whose clinic Proust spent an unsuccessful six weeks. Despite Proust's dismissal of the stay, Barnes notes that in a 1908 notebook, next to jottings on involuntary memory, Proust wrote the single name "Sollier."

Two announcements follow: There will be a story, and this will be Barnes's last book. The story concerns Stephen and Jean, two friends from his time at Oxford University in the 1960s. Barnes has changed their names because he promised each of them he would never write about them.

He sets the scene. At Oxford, the ratio of women to men was roughly one to 6.25, creating an atmosphere of romantic awkwardness among young men educated in single-sex schools. Barnes's bifurcated academic path leads him to meet Stephen and Jean separately. Stephen is tall, soft-spoken, and deeply attentive, studying philosophy as preparation for a career in the civil service. Jean comes from a more unsettled background with separated parents; she is impulsive, flirtatious, and adventurous. Barnes introduces them in a workers' café in Oxford's covered market. They become a couple, and their sweetness together pleases their friends.

Stephen confides to Barnes that Jean is all he has ever wanted and all he will ever want. Jean says she loves Stephen but that he is "so young," though they are the same age. After final exams, each comes to Barnes separately with identical words: They have reached the point where they either marry or split. Barnes suggests something in between, but the idea is dismissed. They split, and Barnes feels betrayed and loses contact with both.

The narrative shifts to Barnes's diagnosis with myeloproliferative neoplasm, a rare blood cancer in which the bone marrow overproduces blood cells. A registrar tells him the condition is "not curable, but manageable," requiring daily oral chemotherapy for the rest of his life. The diagnosis emerges circuitously through a skin condition and a routine blood test that sends him urgently to A&E (accident and emergency) in early March 2020, weeks before the Covid lockdown. Barnes presents the same events in four versions: from memory, from hospital notes, from a draft titled "Jules Was" begun on the first day of lockdown, and from his long-running diary. Each version reveals details the others omit, demonstrating the partiality inherent in all record-keeping. He reflects on his cancer as a "life sentence," imagining death running on parallel tracks alongside his life, with cancer now on a third set. He rejects personifying the disease and notes that mental attitudes make no difference to cancer outcomes.

Years after losing touch, Stephen writes Barnes a letter, and they meet at a station hotel bar. Stephen wants Barnes to help him reconnect with Jean. Barnes resists but eventually arranges a reunion at the same Oxford café, staggering their arrival times. Jean sees through the scheme immediately but laughs, and the reunion succeeds. After four months, they invite Barnes to be best man at their church wedding. Barnes reveals parenthetically that he and Jean once went to bed together during their student years, though the encounter did not go well, and they never spoke of it again.

After the honeymoon, Stephen and Jean settle near each other but not in the same house. They begin visiting Barnes separately and confiding their difficulties. Jean finds Stephen's romantic gestures scripted rather than spontaneous and says he still has "his learner plates on." Stephen confides that Jean thinks he loves her too much. Yet Jean also tells Barnes their lovemaking was "fucking marvellous," and when she asks Stephen where this skill came from, he replies it came from a lifetime of loving her, which makes Jean feel guilty. The tensions escalate. Jean tells Barnes that "happiness doesn't make me happy" and that she feels she is "the answer to a question I was never asked." Barnes attempts an aphoristic summation of their tragedy, then corrects himself, acknowledging they live in "post-tragic times."

Stephen and Jean separate a second time. Barnes blames himself for reuniting them, feeling he treated them as characters in a novel. Jean dies of cancer after refusing treatment. Stephen takes to drink. Barnes inherits Jimmy, Jean's Jack Russell terrier, and reflects that he betrayed his promise to each of them and was "parasitical upon their lives."

In the final chapter, "Going Nowhere," Barnes meditates on departure, aging, and death. He discusses Théophile Gautier's poem "L'Île Inconnue," in which a maiden asks a sea captain to take her to the shore where love lasts forever, and the captain replies that no such shore exists. Barnes connects this to Stephen and Jean: Stephen dreamed of the faithful shore, while Jean knew no such place existed. He describes Jimmy's physical decline in parallel with his own, both arthritic and losing faculties. He discusses Dr. Nancy Kalish's "Lost Love Project," a study of over 1,000 reunited couples, finding that those who failed the second time grieved far more painfully than after the first. He recalls visiting his publisher Carmen Callil three days before her death and telling her he had always loved her. He reveals that Proust's madeleine was, in early drafts, stale bread, then toast, then a hard biscuit, observing that readers would have accepted any of these as perfectly right.

Barnes confirms he is now 78 and that this is his last book. He closes with an image of the writer-reader relationship: two people sitting side by side at a café, watching life pass. He addresses the reader directly, offering no grand pronouncements, only the image of resting his hand on the reader's forearm and slipping away: "No, don't stop looking."