Book Review: ‘Changing My Mind,' by Julian Barnes
In an essay from his collection 'The Dyer's Hand,' W.H. Auden describes his personal Eden: an 'absolute monarchy, elected for life by lot,' a place without automobiles, airplanes, newspapers, movies, radio or television, whose economy depends on lead mining, coal mining, chemical factories and sheep farming and whose public statues are 'confined to famous defunct chefs.'
In 'Changing My Mind,' a slender new book-length essay that has the misfortune to share a title with a 2009 collection by Zadie Smith, Julian Barnes, the novelist and all-around man of letters, envisions a far less idiosyncratic utopia, which he calls, tongue-in-cheekily, B.B.R. (Barnes's Benign Republic). I'd gladly live in B.B.R. — its attractions include separation of church and state, nuclear disarmament, and restoration of arts and humanities courses at schools and universities — while I wouldn't last a day in Auden's zany Ruritania. But which is more fun to read about?
'Changing My Mind' can't make up its mind about whether it's a single piece or, as it appears to be, a loosely connected series of ruminations on the topics of 'Memories,' 'Words,' 'Politics,' 'Books' and 'Age and Time.' The back cover of the handsome Notting Hill Editions paperback calls it 'an engaging and erudite essay,' but, in fact, the copyright page tells us that 'versions of these essays were first broadcast on BBC Radio 3' … in 2016. The book's origins may account for otherwise baffling concluding lines, in which Barnes, now 79, confronts mortality. (As he did, more affectingly, in his 2013 memoir 'Levels of Life.') 'Who knows, perhaps a friendly radio producer with a microphone will come along to my bedside and ask the right questions. If so, I'll be able to let you know.'
Barnes begins the book by pointing out what an odd expression 'I changed my mind' is: 'Where is this 'I' that is changing this 'mind,' like some rider controlling a horse with their knees?' he asks. 'This 'I' we feel so confident about isn't something beyond and separate from the mind' that 'you might as well say 'My mind changed me.''
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