JULIAN BARNES The Man in the Red Coat. Reviewed by Carmel Bird
In The Man in the Red Coat Julian Barnes has created both a biography and a portrait of the Belle Epoque.
The man of the title is Samuel Pozzi, a fashionable, innovative and brilliant Parisian surgeon and gynecologist, a lover, a collector of beautiful objects – and much, much more. But this book is no ordinary biography. It’s by the marvellous Julian Barnes, and it lovingly places Dr Pozzi within his context of Paris during the Belle Epoque, the age of decadence and excess that ran from c.1871 until the outbreak of World War I. The thin biography on Wikipedia will tell you Pozzi’s dates and so forth (1846–1918), but I suggest you don’t bother to look. Read instead this masterpiece by a guiding spirit of both fiction and non-fiction. Structurally, the book moves across character, place and time, with a delicious fluidity. Care is taken constantly to document dates. (There is no index, which is something of a pity. For one thing, the book is inhabited by a vast and thrilling cast of characters, whom readers need to keep track of.) The tone is apparently conversational, playful even, but is in fact strictly controlled by the narrator/author who likes to insert asides, and ironic or even sarcastic comments. He is totally, maybe pathologically, alert – the reader also must remain vigilant lest a key detail slip by amid the rich flood of teasing ingredients. Here, every little thing, dear reader, counts. Trust me.
The narrative begins by suggesting seven possible places to start – the reverse of ‘choose your own adventure’. So already the author is playing with the reader. Another suggestion is to start with a bullet, placing the ‘gun on the wall’ trope firmly in the forefront of the reader’s mind. Who will shoot whom and when and why? But, it goes on to say, there were so many guns ‘around at the time’ that deciding which bullet poses a problem. Dear reader, there is in fact just one gun that really matters here, but its role will not, in the proper manner of a thriller, be revealed until near the end of the story.
So, having presented, on the cover, part of the fabulous image of Pozzi in his red dressing-gown painted by John Singer Sargent in 1881, the book goes on to offer the full portrait drenched in all its gorgeous colour. It is the first picture in a positive storm of images that illustrate the text. Many of these are also portraits in colour, some in sepia. There are 57 little black-and-white reproductions of photographic portraits of celebrities of the time. Everyone from George Sand to Sarah Bernhardt to Lord Lister. Monet, Wagner, Kipling, Kitchener. They first appeared as cards, like cigarette or football cards, given away with chocolate bars made by Félix Potin. Two of the Pozzi cards are reproduced on page 90, and the author explains that he owns them. They are on his desk as he writes, and they exude, he says, ‘dynamism and self-confidence’. There is, of course, something quite amusing in peppering the text with cards from chocolate bars. Many other images are of paintings or just regular photographs.
The author is a constant presence, addressing the reader, often commenting on the composition of the text, sometimes drawing lovely comparisons between the writing of fiction and the writing of non-fiction. He often refers to the fact that in biography there are always ‘things we cannot know’, and in a section towards the end of the book he lists in some detail 20 such things. For instance, we cannot know ‘who was trying to kill whom in a duel, and who was just pretending’. Having dealt with the 20, he says: ‘All these matters could, of course, be solved in a novel.’ And, ‘The more the past recedes, the more attractive it becomes to simplify it.’ As he discusses works of fiction relevant to his topic, he muses on the ‘strange zigzag between fact and fiction’. Much of the text is a rollicking zigzag – pleasurable, but hazardous at times. As I suggested, readers need to keep their wits about them.
One of the key novels of the time was A Rebours by Joris-Karl Huysmans. The character of Jean des Essientes was inspired largely by the life of dandy Robert de Montesquiou (1855–1921) who also inspired the character of Baron de Charlus in Proust. The Man in the Red Coat opens in London in 1885 when Montesquiou, Pozzi, and Prince Edmond de Polignac (1834–1901) were meeting for the purpose of ‘intellectual and decorative shopping’. Pozzi orders 30 rolls of ‘seaweed-coloured curtain material’ from Liberty’s. These curtains turn up again much later in the book. But in a kind of gritty counterbalance to such things as the jewelled tortoise and the perfumes and the flowers and the peacocks, there are factual, tactile accounts of surgical procedures. For Pozzi was a very busy, extremely skilful surgeon, and the narrative spares the reader no detail. If you don’t want to visualise a few images of the operation on a boy suffering from gunshot wounds, look away now:
He made an incision from navel to pubis, and quickly found the most obvious wound: a four-by-two centimetre rip in the small intestine. Slowly extracting more of the intestine, Pozzi discovered five more lesions. At one point the boy stirred and vomited out a further stretch of gut from the incision in his stomach.
This is one of the less confronting stories of surgery in the text. That boy ended up dying, as it happened. But many of Pozzi’s patients lived on.
Naturally, in a saga set in the Belle Epoque, there is quite a bit of sexual activity of various kinds – none of it as graphic as the accounts of surgery. But it’s there as a constant motive, and motif, driving much of the narrative. Money is another driver, and people’s fortunes rise and fall. With Julian Barnes as your guide through this glittering pageant of the dying years before World War I, you will feel the thrill and the horror, and will imagine you might be eating the chocolate bars, collecting the cards, marvelling at the cavalcade of celebrated heroes and villains, feeling yourself staring into the culture that was about to be blown apart by war. Pozzi, in fact, is described in the end as ‘a kind of hero’, in the Author’s Note.
Being the sort of reader I am, I read the Author’s Note before I read the text. It is dated May 2019, and locates the book as having been written ‘during the last year or so before Britain’s deluded, masochistic departure from the European Union’. But Barnes says he declines ‘to be pessimistic’ because having spent time in the ‘distant, decadent, violent, narcissistic and neurotic Belle Epoque’ he is cheerful. And this is because of Pozzi, who, among a host of other qualities:
… greeted each new day with enthusiasm and curiosity; who filled his life with medicine, art, books, travel, society, politics and as much sex as possible.
I loved this book. I hope you do too.
Julian Barnes The Man in the Red Coat Vintage 2019 HB 280pp $39.99
Carmel Bird is the author of 35 books, including novels, collections of short fiction, and books on writing, such as Dear Writer Revisited and Writing the Story of Your Life. In 2016 she received the Patrick White Literary Award. Her e-book of eight short stories The Dead Aviatrix was published in November 2017 and is available from Amazon. Her most recent novel is Field of Poppies (2019).
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