Nothing to Be Frightened Of

Nothing to Be Frightened Of Review

Julian Barnes has been preoccupied with death for most of his literary career — it appears in Flaubert’s Parrot, in A History of the World in 10½ Chapters, in the novella-length The Sense of an Ending — but Nothing to Be Frightened Of is the book in which he confronts it directly, without the protective devices of fiction. Published in 2008, it is memoir, meditation, family history, literary criticism, and philosophy by turns, all organized around the central question that Barnes considers unanswerable but impossible to stop asking: what is it like to be dead?

The book is organized loosely around Barnes’s own fear of death — not a generalised philosophical position but a visceral terror that wakes him at night, a response to the thought of non-existence that is both irrational and, he insists, entirely rational. He examines this fear through his family: his philosopher brother Jonathan, whose materialism leads to equanimity about death in ways that Barnes cannot quite achieve; his parents, whose deaths he catalogues with the precision and sorrow of a son who was not close to them; his French grandmother, who died in a manner both dignified and heartbreaking.

He then examines it through his writers — Flaubert, Stendhal, Montaigne, Shostakovich — who have each confronted mortality in ways that Barnes finds illuminating, consoling, or instructive. The French, he notes, have always been more willing to face death directly than the English, who prefer euphemism and evasion. Barnes does not seek consolation, and he does not find it. What he offers instead is company: the sense that you are not alone in finding this frightening, and that clear-eyed acknowledgement is more valuable than false comfort.

What Distinguishes This Book

Among the qualities that set Nothing to Be Frightened Of apart: The sustained wit does not dilute the seriousness — Barnes uses comedy as a form of honesty rather than evasion; The family history — his philosopher brother Jonathan, his French grandmother’s death — gives the abstract meditation personal grounding; and The literary references (Flaubert, Stendhal, Montaigne, Shostakovich) illuminate rather than decorate. These strengths are evident from the first pages and sustain across the whole work.

Core Ideas

The central arguments the book develops are worth summarising. Fear of death is rational and need not be resolved — it can be acknowledged, examined, and then lived alongside. The French literary tradition, which has always confronted mortality more directly than the English, offers resources that Barnes finds more useful than religion. How we remember the dead is the last gift we can give them — and like all gifts, it involves as much projection as truth. These ideas are grounded in evidence and example rather than speculation, which distinguishes this book from comparable titles that rely on anecdote alone.

The Reading Experience

Nothing to Be Frightened Of is the kind of book that changes slightly depending on when you read it. The surface — plot, character, setting — remains constant, but the reader brings different things to it at different points in life, and the book meets them there. This is a property of enduring work, and it distinguishes Nothing to Be Frightened Of from titles that are consumed once and not returned to.

Limitations

The book is resolutely atheist in its conclusions — readers seeking consolation will not find it. The conversational register can occasionally feel too comfortable for a subject that perhaps deserves more visible discomfort. These are worth knowing before starting, though they are unlikely to diminish the experience for the readers the book is written for.

Genre and Subject

Nothing to Be Frightened Of was published in February 2008. It is a memoir-essay hybrid — Barnes’s preferred genre label is “prose meditation” — rather than a conventional memoir or novel, and its central subject is death: his own anticipated death, his relationship to the deaths of his parents and his brother (the philosopher Jonathan Barnes), and his fear of non-existence. Barnes is not religious, and the book is partly a catalogue of attempts to find comfort in secular philosophy, all of which fail, and a discussion of how various writers and composers have confronted the same problem.

The Brothers Barnes

One of the book’s structural pleasures is the extended dialogue with Jonathan Barnes, who is not only a philosopher but a different kind of person — more systematic, less sentimental, more contemptuous of emotional responses to inevitable facts — and whose responses to Julian’s anxieties are consistently clarifying and consistently unsatisfying. The exchange between the two brothers, conducted partly in conversation and partly through Julian’s reports of what Jonathan has said when asked, produces a kind of philosophical comedy in which the most rigorous position is also the one that provides the least comfort. Barnes has cited Jules Renard, who kept diaries about his fear of death, as a primary source; the book’s tone — wry, anxious, formally impeccable — owes something to Renard’s example.

Barnes’s Later Career

Nothing to Be Frightened Of was published in 2008, a memoir-essay on death, religion, and memory. Julian Barnes won the Man Booker Prize for The Sense of an Ending (2011), which shares Nothing to Be Frightened Of’s preoccupation with how memory falsifies the past and how we understand the approaches of death. The two books are best read together as complementary meditations: the memoir as explicit philosophical inquiry, the novel as fictional dramatization of the same questions.

Final Verdict

Our rating: 4.1/5 — One of the most honest and stylishly intelligent books ever written about death — Barnes neither consoling nor nihilistic, just precise, funny, and relentlessly clear-eyed about what mortality actually means.