Book: Levels Of Life
Author: Julian Barnes
Publisher: Jonathan Cape
Price: Rs295
An hour into Sam Mendes’ cult film American Beauty, the teary-eyed boy says to his girl, “Sometimes there is so much beauty in this world I feel I can’t take it in my heart. It’s gonna cave in.”
Ten pages into the section titled The loss of depth in Julian Barnes’ Levels Of Life, a reader can experience a similar surge of emotions. Except that it’s not beauty but sorrow that triggers such a realisation. The sorrow and loneliness that Barnes writes about upon losing Pat Kavanagh, his wife and companion of thirty years to death.
Kavanagh, a literary agent, met Barnes in 1978. They got married the following year, and in 2008 at the age of 68, she lost a battle to brain tumour. While personal tragedies carry great potential for a book, it is difficult to write about them without getting carried away. And once a writer gives in to that temptation, he loses control on both the narrative and the reader’s attention.
That is never the case with Barnes. He doesn’t drag you down with the burden of his loss. But you will recognise your own emotions in him as he mourns her “uncomplicatedly, and absolutely”. For a reader, there is a certain comfort in this discovery; for being able to find his feelings being expressed in a manner that he can call his own. By sharing his pain with the reader, Barnes helps him to unburden.
The top-down approach of the book is evident in the titles of the sections: ‘The sin of height’, ‘On the level’ and ‘The loss of depth’. They are connected by death and the pain of separation. ‘Sin of height’ is a marriage of the two wonders of 19th century Europe: ballooning and photography. With the invention of the aeroplane still several years away, this was the age of the balloonatics who would risk their lives to soar into the sky. Ballooning linked England and France; France and Germany. The first man to put the two inventions together was a genius called Nadar, the father of aerostatic photography.
A tall gangling, figure with a mane of red hair, Barnes describes him as passionate and restless by nature, and the great poet Baudelaire called him ‘an astonishing expression of vitality. He wore many hats apart from being a journalist, caricaturist, inventor and entrepreneur.
Much of Nadar’s early pioneering work is lost, and what remains are only of passable quality. In 1919, around the time his wife Ernsteine died after fifty-five years of marriage, “Loius Bleriot flew the Channel, a final endorsement of Nadar’s belief in heavier-than-air flight”.
The balloon also brought two unlikely persons together, if only for a brief while: Sarah Bernhadt, the greatest actress of her day, and Fred Burnaby, the giant of an Englishman, who spoke seven languages, fought several wars and had travelled the world. ‘On the level’ chronicles their passionate affair, and the parting of ways. A heartbroken Burnaby died in a battlefield, three years after Bernhadt married a Greek diplomat.
It’s true no text can prepare one for the bereavement that death brings in its wake. And, may be what EM Forster says is right: “One death may explain itself, but it throws no light upon another.” But Levels Of Life has been cathartic for this reader who lost his father three years ago. In Barnes he has found a kindred soul.
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