I am not sure that I have ever liked Julian Barnes much, possibly he was just a la mode when I started reading contemporary fiction. Really didn’t like this one at all.
Elizabeth Finch is a severe FE lecturer, with whom the narrator becomes fixated, and she perhaps a little with him, as she leaves him her papers on her death.
She is obsessed with Julian the Apostate, whoever he was, and with theories that monotheistic Christianity steered civilisation in completely the wrong direction, given the preferable alternative of polytheism. This may be true, but it didn’t really interest me that much in a work of apparent fiction (part two was a lengthy history of references to Julian from Milton and before through to Joyce and later).
By part three I had lost interest, and possibly the will to live. But mercifully short.
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