But now they’re co-parenting a daughter, Emerson, who's almost a year old. Lily Bloom is still running a flower shop her abusive ex-husband, Ryle Kincaid, is still a surgeon. The sequel to It Ends With Us (2016) shows the aftermath of domestic violence through the eyes of a single mother. Elizabeth is an intriguing character, but one is left wondering if Barnes, like Neil, has saddled her with more import than she deserves.Īn engaging if slight tale of intellectual romance.

(She causes a brief furor when anti-intellectual conservatives seize on a lecture she delivers on Julian’s critique of Christianity.) Barnes renders all this with his trademark grace and equipoise but at a low boil the story has few of the fireworks or twists of The Only Story and The Sense of an Ending. But Barnes plainly wishes to elevate Elizabeth to a moral leadership role he feels British society is sorely lacking. Whether all this philosophy makes Neil a better person is an open question he mentions two divorces, but the exes, and the reasons for the splits, are entirely off-screen. Neil’s investigations send him deep into the life of the Roman emperor Julian, a fierce critic of nascent Christianity, and the book’s middle section is consumed by a somewhat drowsy contemplation of Julian’s life. What kind of past and inner life produced, as he puts it, “the most grown-up person I have known”? Upon her death nearly two decades after the course, he has an opportunity to find out: Though their relationship since the class was limited to occasional lunches, she’s bequeathed him her library and papers to puzzle through. Neil, the narrator, is her eager pupil, entranced by her intellectual rigor and self-possession. The Elizabeth of the title is a professor teaching a continuing education class called Culture and Civilisation, with a particular focus on the conflict between Greco-Roman and Christian philosophy. This slim, contemplative, modestly successful novel blends those two themes. Late-period Barnes novels have either been tales of doomed love ( The Only Story, 2018) or intellectual persecution ( The Noise of Time, 2016). A man processes his crush on a former teacher and the impact of what she taught.

Julian barnes elizabeth finch review