Levels of Life
Julian Barnes meditates on love, death, and hot air ballooning. (Lithography: Nadar in a balloon by Honoré Daumier).
Nothing can prepare us for the grief we experience when we lose someone dear to our hearts. Not even great literature. But some books find just the right words to describe the stakes involved. Levels of Life belongs in this category. Written by novelist Julian Barnes, it is a genre-crossing essay about grief and what it means to lose a loved one. Barnes wrote it following the sudden death of his wife, the literary agent Pat Kavanagh, who died of a brain tumor in 2008.
The book is divided into three sections: it travels from a history of hot air ballooning in the 19th century (part I), to a fictionalized short story about the French actress Sarah Bernhardt (part II), before closing with a harrowing memoir of Barnes becoming a widower (part III). Elements and phrases from the first two sections reappear as metaphors in the third, thereby holding the book together. It’s an improbable composition, but it works astonishingly well.
Although death features prominently in many of Barnes’s works – most notably his memoir-essay Nothing to Be Frightened Of (2008) – it didn’t prepare him the least for spousal bereavement. The pain was beyond words and could only be expressed metaphorically: the euphoria of balloon flight representing the giddy elation of love; the romance between Bernhardt and a fellow balloonist standing for the settled period of affection. “But when we soar, we can also crash,” Barnes writes. “There are few soft landings.”
The third and final section strikes a particularly fascinating balance: it is emotionally honest and self-exposing, yet intensely protective of the couple’s privacy. Barnes never mentions his wife by name and we actually learn very little about their relationship. Instead, he focuses on the complex, often paradoxical emotions of grief – the loneliness, the anger, the disorientation, even suicidal fantasies. What saved him from suicide was a renewed recognition for the importance of memory: “I realised that, insofar as she was alive at all, she was alive in my memory. I was her principal rememberer.” Killing himself would also be killing her, again.
Like many of the best books, Levels of Life is difficult to classify because it disregards the conventional boundaries between literary genres. It’s a multi-layered, deeply moving meditation on grief and devastation – a work that demonstrates that Barnes is not only a great wordsmith but also a master of the literary form. The book had a profound impact on me when I read it a while back. I was reminded of it again this week, as my family is saying goodbye to my father who passed away recently. Today would have been his birthday.