Writing novels as a way of being: Julian Barnes in conversation with Ian McEwan:

Julian Barnes and Ian McEwan are widely celebrated as two of the finest writers of their generation. Along with Salman Rushdie and Kazuo Ishiguro, they wrote some of the most memorable novels of the past three decades.

In January 2026 they came together to discuss the book that Barnes says will be his last, Departure(s). It follows a man named Stephen and a woman called Jean who fall in love when they are young and again when they are old. 

Barnes and McEwan draw on the themes of the book to discuss topics including philosophy, art, the slipperiness of memory, the passage of time, mortality and grief.

And all of that, of course, seasoned with humour.

IM - So, Julian, alone together at last.  

JB - This is the first time we've ever performed on stage together. Fifty years we've known one another. Fifty long years, never a cross word. 

IM - Never too late to start. I remember when you famously said that the Booker Prize was posh bingo. You changed your mind on that and I can't remember why. 

JB - No, no, no. Memory. Memory. What I actually said was the only way for writers to stay sane is to treat it as posh bingo. I know, history has edited it. I don't really mind, because it sounds sort of, ha, Booker Prize, ha. But I also remember you saying around the time, now that you won the Booker Prize, that means you will forever be introduced as Julian Barnes, winner of the Booker Prize. You had been Ian McEwan, winner of the Booker Prize, for about 15 years or something like that by then.  

IM - When you get run over by a bus, it says, Booker Prize winner. Hosed off the street. 
Before talking to you tonight, I re-read Departures. And I think I said to you in a note how much I admired its structure. Now, I think structure is an almost invisible element the first time you read a novel. But I had this very strong sense.

So you read from this wonderful and rather startling opening on memory, its unreliability above all. You then announce in that same section that this is your last book. And at that point, I thought, I don't believe this because this is not Julian Barnes. This is “Julian Barnes”. This is a narrator. So already structurally, I'm now reading this as if through a gauze of irony. 



Then your story begins, a story that doesn't have a middle. It has a beginning and it has an ending as you frame it. And you evoke your time at university, Oxford, Magdalene. And your two friends, quite instrumental in bringing together Stephen and Jean and your role in that. And then a rather dramatic reflection on illness and death.

Тhen brilliantly and compellingly, you talk about the radioactive or radiative effects of grief, about which tragically you know a fair bit. And then we come to, I think, the most remarkable bit of this novel. We jump 40 years. Stephen and Jean, who had split apart after their university years were over, and they want to get back together.

And Julian Barnes, or “Julian Barnes”, is instrumental in arranging this in the very same place, the covered market in Oxford, in the very same cafe. 

And then comes what I think is a piece of modern, post-modern, post-post-modern fictional magic. They come separately to your house to talk through their problems with each other. And you try to keep a neutral, friendly tone and advise them. And I thought, this is Julian, now this is a great look back through your work, because the sense of someone investigating the real world and talking about it as an author, and the characters, often blend, sometimes step on each other's toes. But here, it seems you've stepped through a mirror, you've assembled your two characters, they've come to see you, they've come to ask for your advice. You seem to step through the mirror into your fiction, and they're stepping out of the mirror, as it were, into your world. 

So I have to compliment you, Julian. I think it was the cleverest damn thing I've read in a very long time.

And then part five, a marvellous reflection on death, time, and by which time we are completely convinced that you really mean it. This Julian Barnes does not have hyphens around it, it is not an ironic piece of distancing, this is really you. At which point we realise that Stephen and Jean are not characters from your past, they are completely imaginary. 

I want to ask you about re-reading. I have a sense of you as a great re-reader, which is what brings me back to structure. The delight of re-reading a book, especially one that is not too far back in your past, is when its architecture becomes apparent to you. And writers spend so much time on their architecture and it's unobserved, as it were, but with the re-reading we see it as it were for the first time.

JB - I think that's true, yes. I mean we start reading books for their character and plot and sort of feel confident. The point of the first few pages of a novel, it seems to me, is to make your reader confident that you know what you're up to and that if there are things that they don't get or understand, these will be explained at some future point. This is a sort of giving of confidence on both sides. 

I remember when I was at school and we were taught about the novel and there was a theme, there was structure, there was tone, there was this, there was that. And I somehow assumed that the novelist sort of ticked off this and ticked off that. And somehow, he knew or she knew what the overall form was from the beginning. 

And in my experience that's not the case, that often the form comes with the writing. And the other thing is, when I've finished a novel I've forgotten all the sort of false trails, all the sort of ways it could have gone. And then it's a way of making yourself confident that you've got it to its final stage. And it's irrelevant to think about whether this or that had happened.

IM - Which is why sometimes in interviews you feel you're lying about yourself. Because you're speaking about this book as if it was always intended.

JB - Yes, yes, exactly. And it might be a bit weedy to say, it was just luck. It just turned out this way. But of course, it wasn't luck.

IM - No, a lot of sitting around. So, related to structure, let me read you something, because there's something about this which strikes me as perfection. “The old man stood as close to the window as the soldier would allow”. It's the first line of your novel, The Porcupine. 

JB - Is it? 

IM - Yeah, and it's bloody good.

JB - I didn't recognise it at all. 

IM - So, who is this old man? Well, he's the ex-head of state, and he's about to go on trial. The soldier doesn't want him committing suicide by jumping out of the window or escaping or whatever. It's bare and spare, and so it made me think, let's talk about first lines in your books and any other books.

Here's another one. “She stood before us without notes, books, or nerves. The lectern was occupied by her handbag. She looked around, smiled, was still, and began”.

JB - Well, I guessed it. This is a Elisabeth Finch.

IM -Well done. Yeah. Your last novel. My sense of first lines is it's as if you enter a sort of crowded room, and everyone falls silent, and you have to speak. I mean, in other words, your last book was two, three, four years ago. Someone comes into a bookshop, says, what's Barnes up to, and here he is again speaking to me, and it better be good. 

So I wanted you to reflect on first lines. Are they difficult? Do they just spontaneously emerge from the material and there's no problem about them? Do you chew the end of your pencil?

JB - Well, I never assume that the first line I write down when I'm beginning a novel is going to be the first line of the novel. I start in different places. Sometimes I start with a scene which encapsulates the major conflict that is going to happen, and then I have to go back 300 pages before to get to the start of the novel.

Sometimes the start, and not just the first line, but the first movement, just begins to emerge and says, “move me forward, move me forward”.

And then you hit the start and you say, of course, that's obviously the start. It's a fluid process, isn't it? And it's a mixture of control and liberty.

Sometimes you think, well, I can bluff this bit. I've read it five times. It seems good to me. No one else is going to read it five times. I can get away with it. 

IM - Can you get away with it?

JB - They aren’t going to read it five times. 

IM - The most famous first lines are often, I think, absolutely complete lies. I mean, “it isn't universally acknowledged that…” And I think we will agree on this, happy families are not all the same. And you point out in this novel, actually, there are lots of ways of being happy, but misery does have a lot of powerful links in common with every form of misery.  

JB - One of my favourite first lines. “My mother died today․ Оr perhaps yesterday”. L'étranger. It's absolutely sensational.

IM – And “This is the saddest...

JB – “This is the saddest story I've ever heard”. Yeah, that's pretty good. 

IM – How could you stop reading... The Good Soldier.

JB – And it's also one of those first lines which isn't quite true either. It's not a story he's heard. He says, I'm going to tell you the story I've heard, but it's a story in which he, this person speaking, has been in it up to the neck. He hadn't heard it. He's making it sound as if it's more distant from him than in fact it is.

IM – A little section here called Life Versus Books. I like quoting you, Julian, because it brings a sort of frown to your face. You're struggling to remember if this is you or not.

“Life and reading are not separate activities. When your read a great book, you don’t escape from life, you plunge deeper into it. What you are essentially doing, is furthering your understanding of life’s subtleties, paradoxes, joys, pains and truths. 

You’re responding to something that people say, like “Life’s a thing, but I prefer books”. I ask because your writing absolutely drenched in your reading, and it seems to me that this quotation, is a kind of explanation that one's reading then becomes one's experience, and that experience shapes one's writing. It's not about erudition, I think it's about how reading rewires your mind, your brain, and it's very strong in what you write. 

JB – Yes, but I jib at the idea that your writing should be drenched in reading, it should also be drenched in your experience of life, in your knowledge of life.

IM – But you're saying the two are the same. They're not separate activities. 

JB – Yes, they absolutely interpenetrate one another. 

IM – So, there's a book I wanted to give you, Reflections on Ordinary Matters, by the great American philosopher, Thomas Nagel. You know of him. So, he wrote in 1970, If death is the unequivocal and permanent end to our existence, the question arises whether it is a bad thing to die. 

JB – I would say, on the whole, yes. It is, and will soon be, a very bad thing to die.

Actually, it's interesting you brought up his name, because in my first novel, Metroland, where there's stuff about death, unsurprisingly, I said at one point, I wouldn't mind dying if I didn't end up dead at the end of it. Which sort of summed up my attitude to it. And then, about 20 or 30 years down the line, someone suggested I read some Nagel when I was writing a book called Nothing to be Frightened of, which is about family and death. He said exactly the same thing. And just about six months before me, the bastard. Well, you just have to say, great minds think alike, don't you?

IM – Great minds do think alike.

It brought me back to the thought of you announcing that this will be your last book. Does it make the rest of life a little easier, something complete and rounded off? And why announce it rather than just fade away? Why just bring the curtain down?

JB – Well, I like the idea of a coup de théâtre, I suppose. I first thought about the problem of your last book five years ago or something like that. And I remember a great friend of mine, Brian Moore, the Canadian-Irish writer who you must have known. And he said, I don't want to die in the middle of writing a book because then some bastard will come along and finish it off for me. 

IM – As happened with Nabokov.  

JB – As it happened, he did die in the middle or at the start of the book, but his widow didn't get it finished. I think she probably burnt it. And I thought, well, yeah, that's one way of ending. Or I could write a book which was my last book and not publish it, but have it in place so that when I write two or three more books and then I'm chopped off in chapter three of one, that doesn't matter because I've got my last book there in place.

And so I started writing it and as I wrote it, I realised that maybe it would be correct to publish it now. I've always had, as you do, books of ideas and thoughts and this might turn into a novel or whatever. And I went through all the ones that had been crossed off or ticked or whatever. And they were all ideas for books which I might have written five years ago, ten years ago, but not ideas which I felt the slightest urgency or proximity to now. And so I thought, well, you know, maybe I've played all my tunes. Maybe this is the last cadenza or whatever.

IM – So I have a theory about this. I mean, writing novels is not a career. It's a way of being. So even if you don't publish another book, or write another book, you can't stop being a novelist. Because you'll have to go on noticing.

JB – Yeah. I'll be noticing as a human being. But not as one turning it into a novel.

IM – According to the Financial Times, by announcing that this is your last book, you get nicer reviews. And it worked! 

JB – Why do you think my mind works like that? I'm a much more straightforward person than that.

Q&A

- The Booker Prize. Which of your books do you think should have won it?

JB – Well, I can think of one of the ends that shouldn't have won it because I was one of the defeated in the same year. And we were walking in the Chilterns at the start of the year and I said, I'm publishing a novel in September, whenever it is, and he said, oh, I'm doing the same. And I thought he was winding me up. And I said, are you really? He said, yes, it's called The Spoiler. And boy, did he spoil me. 

IM – But it came out as Amsterdam, actually. 

Well, obviously, I should have won it for several of my books. But you can't win it every year. It's one of the rules, I think. You have to live by the rules, as Donald Trump said. 

JB – Do you think you should have won it for a different novel? That's the question. 

IM –  Oh, yeah, I should have won it for Atonement. 

JB – Yes, I should have won it for Flaubert’s Parrot.

IM – Yeah, I think that too. 

Q&A

- What advice would you give to emerging novelists in a world that is reading less than ever? 

JB – Read more. Whenever someone young says, I want to be a writer, what should I do? I say, read, read, read. 

IM – Yeah, how about write? 

JB – Well... If you want to be a writer, do some writing. But then you enter the fray unclosed. 

- I want to read a bit from my book. This is the last page of the book in which the Julian Barnes character is saying goodbye to his readers. 
I shall miss you, whatever that means. Each word in that phrase is weakened and undermined by death. That shall, becomes or will become meaningless. And now at the last, I have no grand pronouncements to offer, no famous last words. Though I came across a good example recently, the first Lord Grimthorpe's urgent dying message to his wife. “We are very low on marmalade”. 

Instead, let me thank you for your sturdy presence, invisible yet lurking like my cancer. When asked how I see our relationship, I reply that I'm not a didactic writer. I do not tell you what to think or how to live. I do not write ex cathedra. Novelists shouldn't speak down to readers from an assumption of greater wisdom. Instead, I prefer an image of writer and reader on a cafe pavement in some unidentified town, in some unidentified country. Warm weather and a cool drink in front of us.

Side by side, we look out onto the many and varied expressions of life that pass in front of us. We watch and muse. From time to time, I will remember things like “what do you make of that couple? Married or having an affair? Look at those fashion victims so pleased at being themselves it's almost touching. Where's that priest off to in such a hurry? What does that kiss mean? An old couple holding hands that always gets to me. Do you think he's a tramp or an artist? Is that a quarrel or just a lover's playful riff? It's a bit Jacobian. Look, a Jack Russell, now there's a lucky omen. There can't be rain in the air, can there? Do you think there's a God? You know I don't. And why are they looking at us all of a sudden?”

Ordinary conversational mutterings, one or none of which might possibly metastasize into a story. Out of the corner of my eye, I see that you share my attendingness but I rarely catch your replies. You're sitting on my deaf side I'm afraid. Still, I hope you've enjoyed our relationship over the years. I certainly have. Your presence has delighted me. Indeed, I would be nothing without you. So, I'll just rest my hand briefly on your forearm. No, don't stop looking and then slip away. No, don't stop looking. 

IM – Julian, do not slip away too soon and know that we'll either be there before you or right at your.