Barnes’ sad memoir of wife’s death a celebration of love

In 2008 Julian Barnes’ wife Pat Kavanagh, was diagnosed with a brain tumour. She died 37 days later. They had been together for 30 years. Levels of Life is not a conventional memoir: it is an account of grief and loss. ‘Grief, like death, is banal and unique,’ Barnes writes, near the beginning of the final section of this strange and viscerally sad piece of writing, which is also a meditation on love and the loss of love.

As well as being a Booker Prize-winning novelist, Barnes is also an accomplished essayist, and a valued contributor to the New Yorker. In order to write about something so close to him and so painful, Barnes begins by writing about something else. The first part of three, ‘The Sin of Height’, is about the early days of ballooning. Each of the three sections begins with a hypnotically repeated image: ‘You put together two things that have not been put together before. And the World is changed.’ The analogy with the way that the world changes when you fall in love is implicit in this beautifully modulated, finely detailed account of Colonel Fred Burnaby, Sarah Bernhardt and Félix Tournachon’s ballooning adventures.