If you’re like most people, you probably have a memory of a favorite teacher who inspired you or touched your life in some meaningful way. Julian Barnes’ slim and elegant, if modest, new novel, ELIZABETH FINCH, will evoke some recollections of a long-ago encounter with an intellectual or personal mentor, and perhaps provoke the wish that it might have been a deeper one.

Neil, the novel’s narrator, who trained as an actor and once had a minor role in a long-running British soap opera, is one of a group of adult students in Elizabeth Finch’s class on “Culture and Civilisation” at London University. Just moments into her initial lecture, he admits that “[w]e gazed back at her, some in awe, a few in puzzlement bordering on irritation, others already half in love,” and he’s clearly one of those in the last category. Elizabeth discourses on a wide range of topics, never using notes and speaking in perfectly formed sentences. The author of two books (both out of print), she’s opinionated, erudite on seemingly every subject, and disinclined to tolerate loose thinking on the part of her students.

"ELIZABETH FINCH is a lovely tribute to an unusual friendship. It’s a thoughtful portrait of a person perhaps known or knowable only to herself."

For nearly 20 years after the class ends, Neil and EF, as he refers to her, meet for lunches several times a year. While the precise age difference between them is never made clear, it seems close enough that a romantic relationship conceivably might develop, but it never does. After her death, Neil, who “failed to understand that she was dying,” becomes friendly with her brother Christopher, her only sibling and executor, a man “seemingly as unexotic and unmysterious as his sister had been exotic and opaque.” The two men are drawn into an unlikely friendship that centers on their effort to better understand Elizabeth’s life.

What gives the novel its distinctive quality is the abrupt shift in its middle section: Neil’s erudite essay on the Roman emperor Julian the Apostate, who died in the mid-fourth century of the Common Era, and whose passing, according to Elizabeth, marked “the moment history went wrong.” At her death, Elizabeth, who introduced Julian to Neil and his classmates as the “last pagan emperor,” bequeathed to him her library and notebooks. A man who considers himself the “King of Unfinished Projects,” not least because he fails to submit the final essay required by her class, takes the gift as an invitation to finally finish one and in the process honor the memory of his late teacher.

The section on Julian offers a fascinating slice of biography about this complicated ruler, an “atypical emperor” and something of an intellectual himself, who “became a bogeyman, a focal point of attack for many subsequent Christian writers, long after the religion was dominant throughout most of Europe and beyond.” What’s most interesting, however, is the essay’s exploration of how Julian has attracted the interest of thinkers and writers that included Montaigne, Gibbon, Ibsen (who wrote a 480-page play about him) and even Adolf Hitler.

Stimulated by his investigation of Julian, Neil attempts to turn his attention to a short memoir about Elizabeth, whom he calls “the most grown-up person I have met in my life.” Lacking the tools of a trained biographer, he wonders how one is able to “make a life, a living life, a glowing life, a coherent life out of all that circumstantial, contradictory and missing evidence.” In the novel’s concluding section, he reveals an incident surrounding one of Elizabeth’s public lectures he calls “The Shaming” that brings an end to her status as a public intellectual and that he regards as a “kind of martyrdom.” It’s an event that provides at least a small window into his fascination with Julian and the role of his story in Elizabeth’s intellectual life.

Summing up his relationship with Elizabeth, the twice-married, twice-divorced Neil writes this about a character who seems destined to remain forever an enigma to him even as he approaches the end of his own life: “There are people who prefer books to life, who are wary of deeper, more unquiet involvements. I don’t think I’m like that; but it’s true that perhaps I preferred loving EF to loving anyone else I’ve known, before or since. I don’t mean I loved her more --- that wouldn’t be plausible --- but I loved her carefully: with care, and fully.”

ELIZABETH FINCH is a lovely tribute to an unusual friendship. It’s a thoughtful portrait of a person perhaps known or knowable only to herself.