“The Man in the Red Coat”, by Julian Barnes

 

288 pages, Alfred A. Knopf, ISBN-13: 978-0525658771

Julian Barnes’ The Man in the Red Coat refers to one Samuel-Jean Pozzi, a French surgeon and gynecologist who was in the thick of La Belle Époque and rubbed shoulders with several of the shooting stars of that tumultuous-yet-inspiring era of French history. Using Pozzi as a kind of guidepost to this fascinating time – along with Prince Edmond Melchior Jean Marie de Polignac and Marie Joseph Robert Anatole, Comte de Montesquiou-Fézensac – we meet several (if not all) of the personages, famous and infamous, that make this era resemble a kind of galaxy in miniature, what with all of the streaking comets that flew across the firmament only to burn out much too soon. Don’t they always.

But perhaps what Barnes has done can best be expressed by Edmond Louis Antoine Huot de Goncourt, the French writer, literary critic, art critic, book publisher and the founder of the Académie Goncourt who, writing in Journal des Goncourt (along with his brother, Jules), summed up what they were trying to do with their newspaper:

 

What we have tried to do, then, is to bring our contemporaries to life for posterity in a speaking likeness, by means of the vivid stenography of a conversation, the physiological spontaneity of a gesture, those little signs of emotions that reveal a personality, those imponderabilia that render the intensity of existence, and, last of all, a touch of that fever which is the mark of the heady life of Paris.

The Brothers Goncourt could not have known that, publishing this declaration on December 2^nd, 1851 (the same day that Napoleon III overthrew the French Second Republic), they were also describing a history of their time written by an Englishman born almost a century later. But this is so, for in writing what are essentially a series of thumbnail sketches and sparkling vignettes about these beautiful – and flawed; oh-so flawed – people he has resurrected the era as a whole (to help with this, the book has been decorated with reproductions of trading cards – similar to the cigarette cards popular at the time – of these personages, produced by the French businessman Félix Potin through his eponymous mass-distribution retail business).

Barnes is nothing if not an excellent writer, and while The Man in the Red Coat reads more like a work of personal reflection on La Belle Époque that he wrote for his own pleasure than for the public at large, many readers I’m sure will nonetheless find as much pleasure reading it as I did. The book jumps around in time, from anecdote to anecdote, from person to person and from place to place, often with little or even no connection between said times, anecdotes, people or places. Thus, if you are unfamiliar with La Belle Epoque or recognize many of the main players – seriously, they all seem to make at least one appearance each – you'll spend a lot of time trying to remember when was when or who did what to who or who was who or what happened where and why (or whether) you should care.

Overall, while I enjoyed reading this book, I was baffled by its lack of chapters (there are just breaks in the writing here and there), index, foot-or-endnotes, chronology or bibliography. These are rather minimal requirements for any history (and make no mistake, this is a history) but there are none to be found here. Furthermore, while the writing is engaging and never dull, it can sometimes slide into self-importance and too-clever references to original source material, as if Barnes were trying to show off his erudition (and don’t get me started on his condescending “Author’s Note” at the back of the book in which he bemoans his countrymen’s regaining their independence by taking Britain out of the European Union). I’m glad I read it, would maybe reread it but can’t be certain that I would buy it.

But enough negativity; once more quoting from a work of this era, what Barnes has succeeded in doing with The Man in the Red Coat is what Joris-Karl Huysmans did in his novel À rebours (Against the Grain):

 

Leaving our petty modern civilization far behind, he conjured up the…glories of distant epochs, their mystic ardors and doldrums, the aberrations resulting from their idleness, the brutalities arising from their boredom – that oppressive boredom which emanates from opulence and prayer even before their pleasures have been fully enjoyed.

As I read this book, for one brief shining moment La Belle Époque was reborn, these beautiful, fascinating, maddening and unforgettable people breathed once more and the world was just a little more elegant than before. Just a little.