The Man in the Red Coat

Julian Barnes seems to be having some sort of second spring this autumn. Fresh from the emotional turmoil of "The only Story" the Barnes pendulum swings literally the other way with this tale of a real life fin-de-siecle aesthete (in a non-Oscar Wildean sense). I treasure Barnes' writing almost as much as that of an anonymous author (later to be revealed as an woman called Jane Austen) with his fine ear(and pen) for the intricacies of human nature and those eloquent pauses between words and phrases who seem to hide so much more than they reveal. This is the sort of book that requires you to have a nap between chapters because each of them carries the richness of a particularly fragrant fruitcake. On the other hand you might just take another sip of Lillet and greedily read on. "The Man in the Red Coat" is the story of Dr. Pozzi, a fashionable Italian Doctor, who, in the company of two other gentlemen, travelled to Paris at the end of the long 19th century to experience the most sophisticated culture known to mankind at the time. Cue some familiar faces(basically everybody ever mentioned in Proust) interspersed with Barnes own take on things(watch for the anecdote on a certain Prince of Wales).