She will change the way you see the world .

Elizabeth Finch was a teacher, a thinker, an inspiration. Neil is just one of many who fell under her spell during his time in her class.

Tasked with unpacking her notebooks after her death, Neil encounters once again Elizabeth’s astonishing ideas on the past and on how to make sense of the present.

#ElizabethFinch #JulianBarnes @VintageBooks #RandomThingsTours @annecater @RandomTTours #blogtour 

But Elizabeth was much more than a scholar. Her secrets are waiting to be revealed . . . and will change Neil’s view of the world forever.

My Review

Neil is our narrator. A failed actor, with one marriage and divorce behind him (so far), he’s a mature student, who becomes fascinated by his lecturer Professor Elizabeth Finch, while taking her class on Culture and Civilization. She’s a typical blue-stocking, never married (as far as we know), wears tweed and brogues, has neatly coiffed hair – I kept imagining a spinster version of Margaret Thatcher.

Elizabeth Finch or EF as the students refer to her, has a deep, lasting effect on the members of his study group, particularly on Neil, but also on Anna, a Dutch girl with whom he has a strange kind of affair. Linda wants EF to help her with her love life or unrequited love (not sure why she would ask EF), and then there is Geoff who doesn’t find her fascinating at all. In fact he finds her views old-fashioned and obdurate. I have to admit I tended to agree with him much of the time.

It’s not really a story – nothing actually ‘happens’ in the traditional sense – it’s mainly Neil’s musings on his platonic relationship and strange crush on this charismatic woman, because once his degree is finished, he continues to meet her for lunch a couple of times a year. Barnes examines the unusual friendship between these two mismatched people. For Neil it’s probably the only satisfying relationship in his life.

After her untimely death, Neil meets her older brother Christopher, who refers to his sister as Liz and admits that he was never as clever as her, or as compelling. She has left her papers and books to Neil, including a lot of material about Julian the Apostate, and the rise of Christianity in Europe, with which he becomes obsessed. He considers writing her memoir, though neither he nor her brother seem to know vey much about her private life.

Elizabeth Finch is certainly not like anything else I have ever read. A fascinating insight, I would have liked to know more about Neil himself – he considers himself to be too dull to be worth writing about – but I feel it would have helped me to understand how and why he became so absorbed in his mentor.

Many thanks to @annecater for inviting me to be part of #RandomThingsTours

About the Author

Julian Barnes is the author of thirteen novels, including The Sense of an Ending, which won the 2011 Man Booker Prize for Fiction, and Sunday Times bestsellers The Noise of Time and The Only Story. He has also written three books of short stories, four collections of essays and three books of non fiction, including the Sunday Times number one bestseller Levels of Life and Nothing To Be Frightened Of, which won the 2021 Yasnaya Polyana Prize in Russia. In 2017 he was awarded the Légion d’honneur.