Staring at the Sun

Staring at the Sun

Julian Barnes

Vintage (1993)

Rating: ★★★☆☆

Tags: Fiction, Literary
Fictionttt Literaryttt

From the Winner of the Man Booker Prize for Fiction 2011 Staring at the Sun charts the life of Jean Serjeant, from her beginning as a naive, carefree country girl before the war through to her wry and trenchant old age in the year 2020. We follow her bruising experience in marriage, her probing of male truths, her adventures in motherhood and in China and we cannot fail to be moved by the questions she asks of life and the often unsatisfactory answers it provides.

From Library Journal

What starts off as a quiet novel about a young girl growing up in rural England during World War II turns out to be the story of a full and diverse life. An unusual and likeable heroine, Jean marries conventionally but 20 years later leaves her husband just before the birth of their son, not in a fit of pique but simply because she realizes she should. In middle age, she is befriended by her son's girlfriend, whose attempts to seduce her are in vain; Jean has always preferred "the sleeping part." Finally, at the age of 100, she remembers a young fighter pilot's description of flying up into the sun. Jean has managed to find answers to most of the questions she has considered during her long life, but why the pilot is fascinated by staring at the sun has eluded her until now. This is a gentle novel by the author of the acclaimed Flaubert's Parrot ( LJ 4/1/85). Recommended.Mary K. Prokop, CEL Regional Lib., Savannah, Ga.
Copyright 1987 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Review

"None of Mr Barnes's previous work...has quite prepared us for the bewildering maturity of Staring at the Sun...it dazzles in depth" Harpers & Queen "Brilliant... Mr Barnes's work is at the forefront of a new internationalization of British fiction" -- Carlos Fuentes New York Times "A remarkable and risk-taking book, breezily philosophical and light-fingered, funny and also genuinely affecting in that it touches both the heart and the head" Glasgow Herald "Barnes seems equipped to write with humour and elegance about anything he turns his attention to" Financial Times

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Julian Barnes’s
STARING AT THE SUN

“One of England’s most interesting and provocative novelists … Barnes … display[s] a remarkable versatility, a dashing wit, and a sense of irony that keeps his wonderfully idiosyncratic creations under tight control.”

—
New Republic

“[Julian Barnes] demonstrates what a fabulous independent voice can accomplish when it keeps kicking away the crutches of contemporary fiction.”

—Philadelphia Inquirer

“Not merely a dazzling entertainer … [Barnes] is a no-nonsense moralist as well, and is as dexterous with the darker elements of betrayal and pain as with the farcical mechanics of love and clashing temperaments.”

—The New Yorker

“Barnes’s books … celebrate the human imagination, the human heart, the boisterous diversity of our gene pool, our activities, our delusions.… They thrill the mind and the emotions; and he achieves, without tricks or puns, what Nabokov loved: aesthetic bliss.”

—Chicago Sun-Times

“Barnes writes with such intelligence and fluency, the result is never less than entertaining.”

—The New York Times

Julian Barnes

STARING AT THE SUN

Born in Leicester, England, in 1946, Julian Barnes is the author of more than ten books, including
Metroland, Talking It Over
, and
Something to Declare.
His work has been translated into more than thirty languages. In France he is the only writer to have won both the Prix Médicis and the Prix Fémina, and in 1988 he was made a Chevalier de l’Ordre des Arts et des Lettres. He lives in London.

ALSO BY
Julian Barnes

Something to Declare

Love, etc
.

England, England

Cross Channel

Letters from London

The Porcupine

Talking It Over

A History of the World in 10½ Chapters

Flaubert’s Parrot

Before She Met Me

Metroland

FIRST VINTAGE INTERNATIONAL EDITION, OCTOBER 1993

Copyright © 1986 by Julian Barnes

All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. Published in the United States by Vintage Books, a division of Random House, Inc., New York. Originally published in Great Britain by Jonathan Cape Limited, London, in 1986. First published in the United States by Alfred A. Knopf, Inc., New York, in 1987.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Barnes, Julian.
Staring at the sun / Julian Barnes.
p. cm.
eISBN: 978-0-307-79779-7
I. Title.
[PR6052.A66577S7   1993]
823′.914—dc20     93-15509

Author photograph © Miriam Berkley

v3.1

To the memory of Frances Lindley
1911–1987

Contents

Cover

About the Author

Other Books by This Author

Title Page

Copyright

Dedication

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Chapter 3

T
HIS IS WHAT HAPPENED
. On a calm, black night in June 1941 Sergeant-Pilot Thomas Prosser was poaching over northern France. His Hurricane IIB was black in its camouflage paint. Inside the cockpit, red light from the instrument panel fell softly on Prosser’s hands and face; he glowed like an avenger. He was flying with the hood back, looking towards the ground for the lights of an aerodrome, looking towards the sky for the hot colour of a bomber’s exhaust. Prosser was waiting, in the last half hour before dawn, for a Heinkel or a Dornier on its way back from some English city. The bomber would have skirted antiaircraft guns, declined the publicity of searchlights, dodged barrage balloons and night fighters; it would be steadying itself, the crew would be thinking of hot coffee fierce with chicory, the landing gear would crunch down—and then would come the poacher’s crafty retribution.

There was no prey that night. At 3:46 Prosser set course for base. He crossed the French coast at eighteen thousand feet. Perhaps disappointment had made him delay his return longer than usual, for as he glanced up the Channel to the east he saw the sun begin to rise. The air was empty and serene as the orange sun extracted itself calmly and steadily from the sticky yellow bar of the horizon. Prosser followed its slow exposure. Out of trained instinct, his head jerked on his neck every three seconds, but it seems unlikely he would have spotted a German fighter had there been one. All he could take in was the sun rising from the sea: stately, inexorable, almost comic.

Finally, when the orange globe sat primly on the shelf of distant
waves, Prosser looked away. He became aware of danger again; his black aeroplane in the bright morning air was now as conspicuous as some Arctic predator caught in the wrong fur by a change of season. As he banked and turned, banked and turned, he glimpsed below him a long trail of black smoke. A solitary ship, perhaps in trouble. He descended quickly towards the twinkling, miniature waves, until at last he could make out a tubby merchantman heading west. But the black smoke had stopped, and there seemed nothing wrong; probably she had just been stoking up.

At eight thousand feet Prosser flattened out and set fresh course for base. Halfway across the Channel he allowed himself, like the German bomber crews, to think about hot coffee and the bacon sandwich he would eat after debriefing. Then something happened. The speed of his descent had driven the sun back below the horizon, and as he looked towards the east he saw it rise again: the same sun coming up from the same place across the same sea. Once more, Prosser put aside caution and just watched: the orange globe, the yellow bar, the horizon’s shelf, the serene air, and the smooth, weightless lift of the sun as it rose from the waves for the second time that morning. It was an ordinary miracle he would never forget.