Like choosing between bacon and egg and bacon and tomato

Christopher Tayler

• The Lemon Table by Julian Barnes
  Cape, 213 pp, £16.99, March 2004, ISBN 0 224 07198 X

Julian Barnes’s new book of short stories is concerned with old age and death. Barnes – who was born in 1946 – should have a few years to go before he experiences either condition, but his fiction has always been precociously interested in both. He visited the afterlife, in the person of a cartoon suburbanite, in A History of the World in 10½ Chapters (1989). In Cross Channel (1996) he imagines himself ‘in his late sixties’. Many of his characters are pensioners, and everyone whose childhood is described in detail – as in England, England (1998) or Staring at the Sun (1986) – is last encountered in serene old age. In Barnesland, the young regard the prospect of not getting any younger with enthusiasm, occasionally even with impatience. ‘I sometimes don’t feel I’m quite the right age,’ says the narrator of his first novel, Metroland (1980). ‘I mean, you may happen to think I’m rather immature’ – he’s in his early twenties – ‘but actually I often don’t feel quite at ease with the age I’ve got. Sometimes, in a funny sort of way, I long to be a sprightly 65.’