From A History of the World in 10 \u00bd Chapters <\/em>(1989) to Levels of Life <\/em>(2013), Barnes has spent a long and garlanded career eluding categorisation and The Man in the Red Coat <\/em>is no exception. Is it a group biography, a biography, or something else? As a portrait of its three protagonists it\u2019s more than lopsided, since Barnes largely ignores Polignac in favour of Montesquiou and Pozzi, both of whom make fascinating subjects in their own right. Montesquiou was a snob with a taste for cruelty, picking up talented boyfriends and destroying them when he grew bored. The dark allure of his character was not lost on artists of the time, and the count appears in several novels, including Huysmans\u2019 \u00c0 rebours <\/em>(1884) and Proust\u2019s \u00c0 la recherche du temps perdu<\/em> (1913-27). He was also the model for Whistler\u2019s Arrangement in Gold and Black<\/em><\/a> (1891-2). It\u2019s perhaps this artistic over-representation that encourages Barnes to focus on Pozzi, himself the subject of Sargent\u2019s Dr Pozzi at Home<\/em><\/a> (1881), a portrait that provides the cover, the title and the inspiration for this book.<\/p>\n Image of book cover for ‘The Man in the Red Coat’ by Julian Barnes.<\/p><\/div>\n If Barnes recounts Montesquiou\u2019s bad behaviour with relish, his sympathies lie firmly with Pozzi, a pioneering surgeon whose innovations in hygiene and surgical technique radically improved survival rates, particularly for bullet wounds to the gut. He treated both public and private patients and was tireless in his promotion of high medical standards all over the world. He was also something of an international playboy, hobnobbing with celebrities and taking mistresses to Bayreuth. Nor did his professionalism prevent him from seducing his patients, and Barnes is careful to trace the impact of his behaviour on his long-suffering family through the journals of his outraged daughter Catherine.<\/p>\n Pozzi himself kept no journal, and it\u2019s perhaps for this reason that The Man in the Red Coat<\/em> sidesteps conventional biography. In fact, for long stretches the book neglects Pozzi in favour of a stroll through fin de si\u00e8cle <\/em>Paris, with Barnes as fl\u00e2neur and guide. It\u2019s a world populated by artists, including Oscar Wilde, Sarah Bernhardt, the Goncourt brothers, Huysmans, Proust and a host of less illustrious figures, like the Symbolist poet and novelist Jean Lorrain, who wasted his talent in endless feuds (he once fought a duel with Proust).<\/p>\n Writing in the fragmentary, episodic style familiar from his recent fiction (The Sense of an Ending<\/em>, The Noise of Time<\/em>), Barnes grants himself licence to stray into any area that takes his fancy \u2013 the Dreyfus affair, duelling culture, Oscar Wilde\u2019s tour of the US \u2013 and in many ways The Man in the Red Coat <\/em>reads as a compendium of familiar Barnesian enthusiasms, including Flaubert, literary style, the nature of biography and 19th<\/sup>-century France. As a result the book, while never less than entertaining, is more extended essay than biography, a companion piece to Something to Declare <\/em>(2002), his essay collection on French culture, liberally sprinkled with colour plates and photo cards of fin de si\u00e8cle<\/em> celebrities. It meanders, with frequent detours, through Pozzi\u2019s life in loose chronology, before eventually arriving at his demise.<\/p>\n One of Barnes\u2019 preoccupations \u2013 here as elsewhere \u2013 is with the challenges of historical memory. \u2018\u201cWe cannot know\u201d\u2019, he writes, \u2018is one of the strongest phrases in the biographer\u2019s language,\u2019 and in a late section entitled \u2018Things we cannot know\u2019, Barnes lists some of the unanswerable questions that surround Pozzi\u2019s life. Many novelists would view the gaps in the historical record as an opportunity, as Barnes is well aware: \u2018All these matters could,\u2019 he notes, \u2018be solved in a novel.\u2019 Which begs the question: why didn\u2019t he weave a novel out of such rich \u2013 and tantalisingly incomplete \u2013 material? After all, he has done it before: both Flaubert\u2019s Parrot<\/em> (1984) and Arthur and George<\/em> (2005) made fiction from nineteenth-century lives. It\u2019s a question that only intensifies at the book\u2019s denouement, when a disgruntled patient shoots Pozzi in the gut and the most celebrated surgeon of the age suddenly finds himself under the knife. Here Pozzi\u2019s life assumes the pattern of art. For some novelists the symmetry would be irresistible (Ian McEwan made a similarly ironic plot twist the climax of Saturday<\/em>). But Barnes is unmoved. As a novelist he is allergic to neat plotting and glib denouements and, as Sebastian Groes and Peter Childs have pointed out, \u2018the unanswered and unresolved meanings of life and death suffuse all Barnes\u2019s work\u2019 (2011, p. 9). In Barnes\u2019 view, it is not the job of fiction to stitch life into pleasing patterns and shapes. It\u2019s only in non-fiction that \u2018we have to allow things to happen \u2013 because they did \u2013 which are glib and implausible and moralistic\u2019 (Barnes, 2019, p. 258). It\u2019s this commitment to life\u2019s complexity, and the limits of knowledge, that accounts for the book\u2019s episodic structure, a structure that, through its gaps and silences, its detours and shifts in focus and tone, embraces mystery, leaves loose ends untied and offers more questions than answers. In Flaubert\u2019s Parrot<\/em>, Geoffrey Braithwaite likens biography to a fishing net, \u2018a collection of holes tied together\u2019 (Barnes, 1984, p. 38). Nearly 40 years on from that award-winning novel Barnes is still fishing in these philosophical waters, hauling lost treasures from the deep, inspecting the flotsam, and contemplating all the things lost at sea.<\/p>\n The Man in the Red Coat<\/em> is available in hardback.<\/p>\n Barnes, J. (1984), Flaubert\u2019s Parrot<\/em>, London: Picador<\/p>\n Groes, S. & Childs, P. eds (2011), Julian Barnes: Contemporary Critical Perspectives<\/em>, London: Continuum<\/p>\n <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Alistair Daniel, Associate Lecturer, Creative Writing In June 1885, three Frenchmen \u2013 the prince Edmond de Polignac, Count Robert de Montesquiou-Fezensac, and the \u2018celebrity gynaecologist\u2019 Dr Samuel Jean Pozzi \u2013 arrived in London. They went shopping, had dinner with Henry … Continue reading ![\"\"](\"https:\/\/www.open.ac.uk\/blogs\/english\/wp-content\/uploads\/2020\/09\/Red-coat.jpg\")
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