Twice divorced, he is oblivious to the advances of one fellow student while embarking on a brief fling with another. Neil’s Platonic infatuation with Elizabeth, to whom he becomes a kind of protégé, serves as a counterpoint to his distinctly unsatisfactory romantic relationships. An unsuccessful actor, sometime waiter and intellectual striver, Neil joins a venerable line of Barnesian protagonists, men just about intelligent enough to grasp how limited their knowledge of others must be, but never quite sharp enough to realise how little they understand themselves. In the middle, in the form of a biographical essay, comes Neil’s effort at piecing together Elizabeth’s scholarly notes on the much-maligned Emperor Julian. The framing narrative consists of Elizabeth’s life story – or, rather, the mostly unsuccessful attempts of her admiring student Neil to construct that story. J ulian Barnes’s new novel has two main characters: Elizabeth Finch, quietly charismatic extramural tutor for mature students at the University of London, and Emperor Flavius Claudius Julianus, aka Julian the Apostate, the last non-Christian ruler of Rome.
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