There Is Nothing To Be Afraid Of by Julian Barnes, Random House.

Many and varied are views and attitudes about death.

Emily Dickinson wrote: “Because I could not stop for death, he kindly stopped for me.”

In his play Julius Caesar, Shakespeare wrote:“Cowards die many times before their deaths;/ The valiant never taste of death but once./ Of all the wonders that I yet have heard/ It seems to me most strange that men should fear/ Seeing that death, a necessary end,/ Will come when it will come.”

William Hazlitt suggested that perhaps the best cure for the fear of death is to reflect that life has a beginning as well as an end. There was a time when we were not, this gives us no concern; why then should it trouble that a time will come when we shall cease to be?

These thoughts on mortality come uneasily to mind after reading There Is Nothing To Be Afraid Of. In this, his 15th book, Julian Barnes confesses that sometimes the fear of death assails him in the night when he is pitchforked back into consciousness. Suddenly he is “awake, utterly alone, beating pillow with fist and shouting, “Oh no, oh no, oh no.”

Now at 62, Barnes has written a book about many things: history, religion, art, literature and family relations – but mainly about our inescapable mortality.

A liberal portion of the book is given over to his relationship with his parents and older brother. In a recent interview, he said: “I’m a novelist and therefore ideas have to be rooted in people. If I’m going to write about death, I’m not equipped to write in a general, theoretical, argumentative, philosophical book about it – that’s not how I write. It has to be connected to me and therefore also my parents, because my experience of people I knew well, dying, is of their dying.”

Barnes used to be an atheist but is now an agnostic. He admires Jules Reynard, the 19th-century French author, who said: “I don’t know if God exists. But it would be better for his reputation if he didn’t.”

Barnes admits: “I don’t believe in God, but I miss him.” And insists that you have to be very foolish to suppose that the generations who believed in God were less intelligent than your own.

The author indicates that of all the professions, medicine is the one most likely to attract people with high anxieties about dying. This is good news in one sense to know that doctors are against death, but less good in that they may unwittingly transfer their own fears onto their patients, over-insist on curability and shun death as failure.

Barnes considers the popular poetic image that compares human life to a bird flying from darkness into a brightly lit banquet hall and then flying out into the dark on the farther side. He writes: “This image doesn’t work for me. It’s pretty enough, but the pedantic side of me keeps wanting to point out that any right-thinking bird flying into a warm banqueting hall would perch on the rafters as long as it bloody well could, rather than head straight out again. Moreover, the bird, in its pre- and post-existence on either side of the carousing hall, is at least still flying, which is more than can or will be said for us.”

Dylan Thomas famously instructed his dying father – and all of us – “Do not go gentle into that good night. Rage, rage against the dying of the light.” This advice, maintains Barnes, “speaks more of youthful grief and poetic self-congratulation than wisdom based on clinical knowledge.”

He refers to Sherwin Nuland, an American surgeon who wrote the book How We Die. Nuland stated plainly: “No matter the degree to which a man thinks he has convinced himself that the process of dying is not to be dreaded, he will yet approach his final illness with dread – gentleness and serenity are unlikely to be his option.”

Long-lived Bertrand Russell remained an atheist into his old age. He was asked, what if the Pearly Gates were not a fantasy, and he found himself faced by a deity he had always denied? “Well,” Russell used to reply: “I would go up to Him and say, ‘You didn’t give me enough evidence.’”

Despite its forbidding subject, this book is often witty and provocative, rather than morbid and depressing.

Unhappily, there is no way to elude the harvesting angel with his scythe, but this protean book provides alternative avenues and approaches on how to face the inevitable.