‘Young, middle-aged, elderly, old, dead: this was how life was conjugated. (No, life was a noun, so this was how life declined…),’ Julian Barnes observed thirty years ago in Cross Channel, a collection of stories published to coincide with his fiftieth birthday. Now, as he turns eighty, comes Departure(s), which he calls ‘my last book – my official departure,’ and focuses on that declension’s final stages. 

Death and its forerunners aren’t new presences in Barnes’s pages. Old age links the stories in his second collection, The Lemon Table (2004). His third, Pulse (2011), ends with a man trying to mitigate his wife’s plight as motor neurone disease cruelly erases her senses one by one. His most remarkable non-fiction book, Nothing to Be Frightened Of (2009), provided so compendious a coverage of last things that it seemed unlikely he could muster any further words on the subject.

Barnes acknowledges ‘a sense, or a vivid fear, that after forty-four years of being published, I must be beginning to repeat myself, coming back to the same old tropes and memes, rehearsing my favourite quotations from my favourite authors’. And there are moments when you feel Departure(s) might have been