Death on the installment plan: Julian Barnes tries to overcome his thanatophobia, fails, writes book instead—and it’s pretty good!

Now the leaves shrivel, brown and fall from the trees to be obliviously trampled into wintry pulp; now the air turns crisp and thin, the days shorten and the nights forbiddingly chill—what better time is there to think about death! I’ve been reading the Nothing to Be Frightened Of (Random House, $32.95), English novelist Julian Barnes’ latest work of non-fiction. I’ve been reading it mostly outdoors, perhaps because my denial of summer’s end is nearly as resilient as our collective denial of that bigger, more ominous End. My reading of this divertingly morbid little volume has passed largely over pints of rich, opaque, iron-fortified beer on a tavern’s dusky patio until my fingers ached, a sensation that starts to blur its origins—is it just the coldness or the weakening effects of time on my digits?—once you reach a certain age, and that age likely depends on whenever it was you experienced le réveil mortel, a handy term dreamed up by Charles du Bos which Barnes suggests is best translated as “the wake-up call to mortality.”

I don’t know if this sounds like somebody’s idea of bragging, but I actually can’t even remember my own réveil. It seems like it was always there, already hatched and doing its work on my well-fed anxieties before I even knew what anxiety was. There are those, I’m told—and not only those who ascribe to religious beliefs—who aren’t plagued by fear of death. For them, Nothing to Be Frightened Of should hold some anthropological curiosity, a primer on what the fuss is all about. For the rest of us, Barnes’ pithy, anecdotal and arguably kind of amiably aimless thanatophobist’s memoir is all too familiar in its chronicles of late night sweats, those special sorts of panic attacks reserved for involuntary nocturnal “pit-gazing.” Barnes, now 62, is a non-believer, so his pit, for the record, is truly fucking fathomless, and the title of his book needs to be read with the emphasis on that first word: it is precisely nothing that’s so frightening.

Barnes goes through any number of age-old forms of philosophically intoned consolation, from the religious to the genetic, and finds more than adequate grounds for dismissing every one as insufficient. But consolation, that is, grown-up consolation as opposed to the rubber nipple type, doesn’t seem to be what this book is all about—unless we consider the value of the simple consolation of recognition, the reminder that we’re all in the same boat… even if it’s eventually going to smash into an iceberg.

“It is when faced with death that we turn most bookish,” observed Jules Renard and quoted by the Francophile Barnes, and for me this rings true. Literature, perhaps above all texts that survive their authors, holds a singular link to mortality, and books, hand-held, intimate by nature, closely invoke our private dialogue with time. Barnes, while claiming that if given a strict number of days left would probably chose the emotional mainline of music over books—also pretty sensible if you ask me—thus makes the refrain of Nothing to Be Frightened Of references to the books and authors he knows best, which seem mostly to be late 19th century and early 20th century Euros, like Flaubert, Zola or Turgenev, who, as cited by Barnes, once claimed that Russians have a unique talent for swatting away thoughts of death, making them disappear into the “Slavic mist.” “Nowadays,” Barnes later points out, “both the gesture and the mist are available pharmaceutically.” I guess this would be an example of another form of consolation here: humour, which is something Barnes appears to be in no danger of losing.

Barnes’ book is hardly all-encompassing, its consideration of “how we die” being largely confined to how middle-class westerners with reasonable access to health care die. No matter how universal a chord he strikes in his candid exploration of his own thanatophobia and that of people he’s been close to, Barnes never even begins to account for the varieties of thanatophobia that distinguish us culturally. But in a sense, the specificity of Barnes’ book, the personal aspect of it, is its real strength. As much as anything else, Nothing to Be Frightened Of is about Barnes coming to terms with death through the prism of his own family, through recalling the deaths of his parents and grandparents—each of whom are fun characters to spend time with and vividly drawn by the author—or consulting his renown philosopher brother; through trying hard to remember things about the past and about people, all the while acknowledging that memory and the imagination are nearly interchangeable. Barnes seems perfectly comfortable with the vagaries of memory, since as a novelist he’s vocationally inclined to believe some deeper truth may be gleaned from the (re)construction, however founded on the unintended fictions of our murky consciousness. And in these truths are perhaps a third and last form of consolation: our number may be up sometime, but before then, at least there might be one more sublime spark of understanding. All for naught perhaps, but a spark all the same. 

Snow, apparitions, death, birth, gambling, war and beestiality: these are but a few samples of What the Crow Said

In some regards, it was as though the book itself, our book, was at once magical and realistic. Maybe 15 years ago my old buddy Rich had found it in a house under construction in a Calgary subdivision while drunk. He carried it home and, in accordance with his perverse habit, quickly removed the dust jacket and chucked it—his bookshelves are lined with such appallingly denuded volumes. He then made a pot of coffee and read it all through the night. When he split with his girl the year following she took the book to Vancouver and he moved to the Yukon, yet months later he found it again nestled between catalogues in the washroom of a mutual friend who claimed to have no memory of its arrival.

In an act he’d later regret, Rich lent the book to me not long after their reunion. It went from this point to live in the trunk of my car for years, traveling with me all over this end of the country, unread and forgotten. The car is long gone, and I assumed I’d lost the book until finally, just last year, I found it again, taking refuge in my parents’ basement following a flood. So it was only during this last week that, with the coming of Canada Day and an accompanying desire to fulfill old promises I read the damned thing, weirdly spellbound, exactly 30 years after it’s publication. It starts like this:

“People, years later, blamed everything on the bees; it was the bees, they said, seducing Vera Lang, that started everything. How the town came to prosper, and then to decline, and how the road never got built, the highway that would have joined the town and the municipality to the world beyond, and how the sky itself, finally, took umbrage: it was all because one afternoon in April the swarming bees found Vera Lang asleep, there is a patch of wild flowers on the edge of the valley.”

Vera Lang’s impregnation by bees among the grasses of Big Knife, a particularly vulnerable settlement perched ambiguously on the border of Alberta and Saskatchewan, looms indeed as an omen of all that ultimately passes in Robert Kroetsch’s What the Crow Said. Summoning up the sort of only half-fathomable eroticism that is exclusive to literature, Kroetsch describes Vera’s body as “singing like a telephone wire… her belly tightening to the push and rub of her myriad unthinking lovers,” while every other inhabitant of Big Knife is suddenly seized with the sudden awareness of a catalytic event occurring in their midst, even the boys at school who collectively guess “they were confronting a mystery greater than any they were ever expected to or would ever learn.”

Kroetsch’s narrator, not unreliable but rather openly uncertain, follows Vera’s insect tryst with stories of deaths foretold, an unyielding winter, the erection of a prairie lighthouse, ghosts, countless strange killings, a child raised by wolves who becomes a meteorological prophet, a sex-crazed Frenchman convicted of murder who invents a flying machine and escapes from jail to seek out Vera’s love letter-writing little sister, still more inexplicable pregnancies, and of course the arrival and eventual departure of the cantankerous and possibly sagely talking crow of the title. Kroetsch’s characters are perpetually struggling to come to terms with the unpredictable wrath of both nature and machine, not to mention human desire. One even goes so far as to deny the existence of gravity. Their stories emerge from Kroetsch’s adoption of magic realism, an experiment, rarely fashionable among the literati, that’s likely kept What the Crow Said from being regarded with the esteem given to Kroetsch’s best-known novels, The Studhorse Man, Gone Indian and Badlands. Yet Kroetsch deserves credit for recognizing the genre’s utter suitability for conveying of tall tales told in prairie taverns and communities whose lives depend on the caprices of weather in a place where the weather makes no fucking sense at all. And Kroetsch handles the medium with ribald comic invention, making for a very entertaining, audacious and frequently poetic read.

Magical explanations seem not to be the whimsy of Big Knifeans but rather a coping mechanism for difficult lives concerned with fertility, family, land and effective negotiation with animals. These people, mostly weak, distracted men and formidable, hard-working women, suffer to hilarious extremes. For much of the novel’s mid-section the town's men become ensnared in a game of schmier from which they are unable to escape for months, like the victims of spell that would normally be dreamed up by Luis Buñuel for the bourgeoisie of France or Mexico. The game moves from locale to locale, the men rotting away in the process. “Men lay in their own vomit, gagging and crying. Husbands ignored the entreaties of their wives, fathers denied so much as a nickel or dime to the children waiting in parked cars…” The addiction represents a catastrophe built on boredom, frustration and susceptibility to games of chance that resonates with anyone whose spent any time in a some rural Chinese Canadian restaurant with a VLT machine plugged into a corner socket, occupied for hours at a time by some hypnotized old timer unable to even remove his parka.

It’s in this manner that the greater truths are found through exaggeration. Kroetsch’s use of magic realism is come by honestly because he so clearly recognizes that the fantastical elements in his story must possess an intuitive logic. Kroetsch is of course a prairie boy himself, born 81 years ago in Heisler, and by the time of What the Crow Said was well into a career that capitalized on his understanding of Albertan vastness, xenophobia, and terror. All of this was, if I recall correctly, stuff Rich was trying to tell me when he placed the book in my hands all those years ago, back when its corners were crisp and pages un-yellowed. But sometimes a book, just like the rains that end a prairie drought, just needs some extra time to get to you.