“Ever heard of Julian Barnes?”, Julian asked. Julian is German, bespectacled, and highly intelligent; he knows most things about everything, so I wasn’t surprised to realise that he also knew most things about 21st century English literature. They’re both called Julian, and I could’ve changed his name for the purposes of this story to avoid possible confusion with no impact on the events. But I didn’t.
“A little bit, you?”, I replied flippantly. It was true. I knew the name, I knew that he was regularly in the conversation for the highest novelling prizes worldwide, but I couldn’t name even one of his books. Julian scurried upstairs, returned with the turquoise paperback edition of Flaubert’s Parrot and handed it to me.
Often, when people recommend me books, I don’t read the blurb. I know, keep hold of your hats. But are books intended to be consumed with the blurb or without? Such a dense amuse bouche risks ruining one’s appetite before the book has begun. Is the blurb a prologue to the novel as intended by the author, or a biproduct of the commercialisation of literature? Some might say it doesn’t matter, and perhaps in some cases it doesn’t. Indeed, it is possible to write a blurb in a way that does not profoundly alter the reader’s perception of the book itself. But how soul-sucking must it be for an artist to be forced to plaster a 10-line summary on the back of their art? I suppose the only way to get over that is to view it not as a summary but as an advertisement for the art. But a lot of writers with the right to write their own blurb might say little more than, “Read this book, it’ll enrich you, or don’t, I don’t really give a shit.”
I didn’t read the blurb of Flaubert’s Parrot, and I don’t have the book with me now, but I think when I do I will read the blurb. Because I really don’t know what it would say. The book has no distinguishable plot. It is about Flaubert, about his life and literature, his friends and enemies, family and lovers, and the sources of his inspiration (Loulou the stuffed parrot, for example); it is also about the narrator, Geoffrey Braithwaite, a former doctor turned Flaubert expert (an Exbert? That’s disappointing.); and it is about humans and human experience, containing life lessons without really teaching them. The chapters are hardly ordered and broadly stand-alone, though one has the feeling throughout that there is a guiding principle to the randomness which one might find if one looked hard enough. But there is no story, there are no character arcs, no climax or denouement, and by the end it seems that the only thing holding the novel together is the stuffed parrot.
Braithwaite begins the novel in search of the stuffed parrot. It is at once animal and object; it stands for something alive but is itself dead. Its path crossed with Flaubert’s once upon a time and it is the closest that Braithwaite can get to the French novelist who has almost inexplicably consumed the later years of his life. Such an item seems ready made for literature, pre-packaged and laced with symbolism, but Barnes is careful not to break the bird’s slender legs by laying any more metaphor on the animal’s back than what is already there, natural and light as a feather.
The imagery is easy and nonchalant, much like Barnes’ approach throughout. He sets an idea loose and watches it go, and his hands-off approach to storytelling is what so many writers strive for and only the best achieve. Much of the novel is non-fiction, anecdotes and facts about Flaubert and 19th century France, but the narrator’s position is not didactic but almost observationist; the facts are speaking, the reader is listening, and he is somewhere in the middle.
This position is complicated further by his choice to speak through the character of Braithwaite, who for large portions of the book is absent as a character and may as well not exist (or may as well be Barnes). We, as readers, spend the duration trying to piece together who Braithwaite is and, more importantly, what he is doing there. Speaking through a character certainly affords a writer a certain freedom, creating a distance between the words and the wordsmith and permitting honesties, oddities, and extremities with reduced responsibility. But can we assume that this is indeed what Barnes is doing? In fact, as in the case of the parrot, Barnes has created a bottomless well of meaning, where the harder you squint, the further it goes. It is the mark of non-artificial writing. We await the big reveal, the collision of Flaubert and Braithwaite, a eureka moment of some sort, but Barnes has no intention of giving it to us. The loosely cyclical parrot narrative is the closest thing to finality that we get, and though we may grasp at parallels between Emma Bovary and Braithwaite’s ex-wife Ellen, Barnes, Braithwaite, or perhaps simply the book itself is by no means ashamed to leave us hanging.
Now, I’m not always in the mood to wilfully let beautifully worded anecdotes about people I don’t know anything, nor really care, about wash over me in any particular order for an hour or so. There were times when the book frustrated me, or even made me angry, and I wanted to grab this puzzling amalgam of writer, narrator and novel by the shoulders and shout ‘Are you not taking this seriously at all?’. And whilst there were sections of prose which, Wilde-like, positively thrilled me simply due to the individuality of ideas and deftness of phrasing, I find Philip Larkin’s front-cover description of the book as ‘unputdownable’ laughable. Of all the books I’ve ever enjoyed, it is by far the most putdownable.
Now at the other end of the book, I know more about both Barnes and Flaubert than I did before. Was it a problem that I knew nothing about either of them beforehand? Yes, a bit. I learned a bit about Madame Bovary (but not very much), I learned who George Sand was (and about 100 pages later that she was in fact a woman), I read many anecdotes and tasted them briefly before they dissolved on my tongue and fled my memory permanently. Informative, not really. Enjoyable, mostly. Impressive, certainly.
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