Nothing to Be Frightened Of

By Julian BarnesKnopf, 243 pp., $24.95

Julian Barnes tries; he tries mightily and repeatedly in these protracted variations on and digressions away from the Big Last Thing. But in the end, like Emily Dickinson, he hasn't been able to Stop for Death, and plainly (barring a late unwelcome word before this gets into print) Death hasn't Stopped for Him.

"Nothing to Be Frightened Of" circles the age-old theme we starkly put as: "I am going to die." Back in the 15th century the Scottish poet William Dunbar wrote "Lament for the Makers," a desolate landscape of death's depredations. The phrase "timor mortis conturbat me" (fear of dying torments me) tolls at every fourth line.

Barnes is a British novelist of humane irony, antic imagination, and unsettling perceptiveness. He constructs a many-leveled scaffolding of argument, memoir, literary reference, and musings all around the dark pit. He doesn't quite convince us he is staring into it.

"Oh no, oh no, OH NO!" he reports wailing after awaking to a sudden death thought. And then reflects that as a writer he ought to have found better words. Perhaps that only seems frivolous; it could be the medieval trope of death stripping the beauty of her looks, the rich man of his wealth, the sovereign of his state, and - here - the artist of his voice.

Mainly, though, Barnes writes around death more than about it. Between the mortis and the conturbat falls a self-conscious beat of the breath. Medusa's contemporary visage lacks snakes; there is no defiance in staring into it. Better to juggle it.

The juggle takes us traveling through a variety of precincts. One of the most compelling is Barnes's wary, still estranged treatment of his mother and father. Both were schoolteachers, she bossy and opinionated, he mild and ironic. As a philosopher brother put it: "I incline to think that the strongest feeling Mother ever allowed herself was severe irritation, while Father no doubt knew all about boredom."

His true parents, Barnes insists, were writers and composers; his filial account has more to do with remains than lives. He bundled odds and ends from the parental house in trash bags; then, economically, emptied the contents into the dump and saved the bags. Hearing a metal cowbell that had been purchased by his father clanking down "felt slightly cheap: as if I had buried my parents in a paper bag rather than a proper coffin."

Seeming coldness; in fact something a little different. Barnes applies life-mocked-by-death to his mother and father, not so much exploring who they were as "trying to work out how dead they are."

He makes any number of excursions away from the death theme before circling back. Some are commonplace - on free will, memory, the old philosophic argument about the reality of reality - and wanderingly unfocused. His strength lies in particulars, and many are splendid.