43 Julian Barnes, Flaubert’s Parrot (1984)

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How do you get into the head and heart of an artist you admire? Maybe you can’t, however much you want to. Julian Barnes’s head-spinning third book squats at the junction of biography, literary criticism, and postmodern fiction, thumbing its nose at all three. Its fussy narrator, a retired doctor called Geoffrey Braithwaite, is a Gustave Flaubert superfan who, grief-stricken after his wife’s death, wants to find out everything about the author of A Sentimental Education and Madame Bovary (see p. 32) to plug the gaping hole in his soul.

Braithwaite can’t stop himself obsessing about the minutiae of Flaubert’s life, even though he knows deep down that doing so won’t help him. A “definitive” account of any life is as fantastical as a unicorn. Why, he wonders, does the writing make us chase the writer? What makes us “randy for relics”? On a pilgrimage to the Musée Flaubert in Rouen, Braithwaite is tickled by the sight of Loulou, the stuffed parrot the writer supposedly kept on his desk while he was working on his story “A Simple Heart.” A few days later, however, visiting the Croisset pavilion where Flaubert lived and worked from 1843 until his death in 1880, he finds another parrot claiming to be Loulou. Which is the “real” one? Braithwaite wonders if somebody knows the answer—and if it matters to anyone except him.

Bowie fans might well ask: which is the “real” parrot, David Bowie or David Jones? Published in 1984 and shortlisted for that year’s Booker Prize, Flaubert’s Parrot coincided with a dip in Bowie’s creative energies. He had just made one of his worst albums, Tonight, and seemed to be losing his way, or at least less interested in being the brilliant maverick “David Bowie” and more in being an actor and mainstream entertainer—someone closer to his ordinary, unstarry “David Jones” persona. A version of the conflict is played out for laughs in Julien Temple’s long-form video Jazzin’ for Blue Jean, released in cinemas that year. In it, Bowie plays both the exotic pop star Screaming Lord Byron and Vic, an ordinary nerdy bloke who lies about his connections to Screaming Lord Byron to impress a girl. “You conniving, randy, bogus-Oriental old queen!” Vic taunts Byron at one point. “Your record sleeves are better than your songs!”

David Jones the family man was self-effacing, even ascetic; especially in his last years, when, if you believe the rumors, he spent most of his time holed up in his Manhattan apartment reading, his only companions Iman, daughter Lexi, and dog Max. But you don’t have to look hard to find irony in the fact that David Jones was embracing anonymity just as his internationally famous alter ego was tending the archive that would become the V&A’s world-conquering 2013 show David Bowie Is.

Bowie claimed not to be interested in his own mythology. But this wasn’t true. In reality he was his own Geoffrey Braithwaite—an obsessive reader of books about himself, even ex-wife Angie’s. He had always been a hoarder. After his heart attack he started to expand his already vast collection of objects relating to his career, even buying back items like synthesizers he had given away years earlier. Why so randy for relics?

Throughout the 2000s rumors swirled that Bowie was writing his autobiography. Instead we got David Bowie Is, so we can’t complain. At the Croisset pavilion, Geoffrey Braithwaite is humbled by the tumbler from which Flaubert supposedly took his final sip of water. At the V&A, fans queued to see a tissue blotted with Bowie’s lipstick.