I cannot imagine anyone — except perhaps a fanatic of the history of hot-air ballooning — who could pick up Julian Barnes’ new novel Levels of Life in a bookshop and find the first few pages compelling. The first pages read like a collection of museum captions, alternatively describing three historical ballooning flights in sentence-paragraphs of incisive detail, which leave the reader without any sense of character, plot or imagery to hold onto — only ample space, between the brief blocks of text, in which to feel puzzled. It is perhaps the blessing of an acclaimed author of twenty books, including Flaubert’s Parrot and the Man Booker Prize-winning The Sense of an Ending, that Barnes’s reputation runs ahead of him, and he might count on the reader’s patience as he delicately integrates, between dates and facts and block quotes, a layered view of two eventually dramatic (and partially true) stories of balloonists and bohemians in late nineteenth century France and England. The tale follows the life of the “flame-haired” Félix Tournachon, who soared above France in balloons and, for the first time in history, photographed it from above, as well as the brief, life-altering romance between the “balloonatic” world traveler Colonel Fred Burnaby and the tiny, superstar actress Sarah Bernhardt, which never managed to lift off from the ground.
We could say that Barnes’ novel begins at the height of Tournachon’s photographs, which allow us “to look at ourselves from afar, to make the subjective suddenly objective.” From this height, one can recognize the patterns of human existence, though it is hard to know why they matter. From this height, as Barnes later writes, our planet looks “beautiful,” but also “irrelevant.” Intricately, but impersonally, Barnes begins by drawing out the lines of overlap between his stories: there are three balloon rides, three “luxorious” lovers (Tournachon, Burnaby, and then Barnes himself) and three occasions upon which life brings together “two things that have not been put together before,” leaving the world, or at least the characters’ worlds, forever changed as a consequence.
Even as real emotion begins to permeate the stark and concise narrative, and as the tightly organized paragraphs of the first two sections descend into the messier regions of the human soul in the torrent of the author’s personal grief at the death of his wife, literary agent Pat Kavanagh, Barnes still grasps for a sense of the logical ordering of the universe. It is what he has instead of God. The old patterns therefore return, though they become, like so many “clear and solid concept[s]” we try to apply to death, “fluid, slippery, metaphorical.”
“You put together two people who have not been put together before,” Barnes begins, repeating the formula of the first two sections, but the equation devolves into something beyond logic.
Then, at some point, sooner or later, for this reason or that, one of them is taken away. And what is taken away is greater than the sum of what was there. This may not be mathematically possible, but it is emotionally possible.
When life — and death, which is a part of life — is not viewed from the objective distance of a hot-air balloon, when it is viewed up close and in present tense, it does not make much sense.
“It is all just the universe doing its stuff,” Barnes repeats to himself. He also contemplates suicide and talks aloud to his deceased wife years after she has been buried.
Aesthetically, the first sections of the novel are remarkable in their combination of simplicity and specificity, and gradually, as the story lowers to ground level, one feels a dull affection for the characters and their lost potential for love. But it is only in the final section that the novel reaches out from the ink and grabs you and shakes you and will not let you ignore the extreme heights and depths of joy and grief, of understanding and confusion, of television banality and operatic emotion. And thus it is these very extremes, despite the heartache they bring with them, which make human life on earth — that distant black-and-white photograph from a hot-air balloon — once again relevant.
To give form to life without reducing it — and to do so in a new way — is, I believe, the mark of a great novel. And in 128 pages, Julian Barnes reaches to encompass the whole of human experience in three chapters and three “levels of life,” as the novel travels from the soaring balloons of the first section to a grave six feet underground in the last, from the sense of a patterned universal to the chaos of the intensely personal, from the height of hopefulness to the depths of despair — and back again. The characters’ lives are, in turns, frustratingly small and wrenchingly tragic, but Barnes suggests that all we have are these extremes, and perhaps they are enough.
