The Lemon Table

The new short story collection from Julian Barnes. Set in contemporary suburbs, to 19th century Sweden and Russia, all the stories have age, and growing old as their theme.

(Edited highlights of the panel's review taken from the teletext subtitles that are generated live for Newsnight Review.)

KIRSTY WARK:
There is a beauty in the language. He gets the conversational ticks, the anachronistic conversations. But does he have any emotional heart?

JOHN HARRIS:
Yes, I thought it did. There are two problems with short stories. You either get inconsequential glimpses, or it's so fertile you think: go on and write the novel. The one set in 19th century Sweden, all about unrequited love in a Swedish town, is glorious. It has a sense of old age, as a time of adjusting to as much what doesn't happen as what does. There is one about a man who takes exception to a man coughing in the theatre. You get the wonderful sense of the fearlessness of old age too. It did the short story's job tremendously well. I really enjoyed it.

BONNIE GREER:
He writes like an angel, almost the writer's writer. You can see the Flaubert among others in there. How old is he?

WARK:
Not old.

GREER:
I just thought they are so gloomy, in a strange way. I don't know why.

HARRIS:
Because everyone was about to die!

WARK:
Why does that have to be gloomy?!

HARRIS:
I don't think it was that gloomy.

ADAM MILES-JONES:
The psychology is all negative in this. It's terrible to stop having sex, terrible to still want it, terrible to still try to have it. Everything is negative. The best you can hope for seems to be to savour your own defeat, which is what the two historical characters do in two stories.

HARRIS:
Some of these stories are fantastically bleak. "Appetite", about the guy who in senile dementia reveals horrible sexual thoughts, but there is something really compelling about them.

WARK:
There is one that's particularly clever, about the man who eschews gambling because he has to make the decision of how to conduct his life. That was clever and funny, but there didn't appear to be any sense of tenderness in these stories.

HARRIS:
I don't agree.

GREER:
All had the same colour. Again, they are beautifully constructed, but the colour and the tempo, it's all the same. You close the book, walk away and think, "Is that it?"

MARS-JONES:
It may be that the stylistic range is broader than the emotional range. The person you mentioned, who had become very austere, he doesn't have joy of life at all apart from there is a paragraph about childhood. It was fascinating in The Fruit Cage, when there is a memory of the smells of childhood, and suddenly the hint that you might be full of memories, because otherwise for these characters the past is completely past.

WARK:
What about the idea these characters all seemed to display a lot of prejudices, a lot of dubious beliefs, rather looking back and saying, "I believed in something for the right reasons"?

MARS-JONES:
The marriages are horrible but the bachelordom is no treat either.

GREER:
We don't want to seem as if we're putting him down. It's just that, inside each of the stories, there is a beautiful rich world. There are all kinds of possibilities in these stories. The Fruit Cage is an example of the possibilities. But then he ends on the same note with each of them.

MARS-JONES:
I did have the feeling that it was a depressed book as well as a depressing one.

GREER:
Exactly, you wonder why?

MARS-JONES:
We are not attacking it.

HARRIS:
Personally, I am a sucker for bleakness. I don't think it was simplistic bleakness at all. You could sense that these people were surveying their whole life's experience and it had a wonderful depth to it. Doors weren't being shut in a cold, sudden fashion here. They were being shut quietly and contemplatively. That came over very well.