Julian Barnes - The Man In The Red Coat (Jonathan Cape, 2019) *****

 "The Man In The Red Coat" is one of the best books that I've read in many years. It crosses the border between history and literature. The history part describes the live of Samuel Pozzi, a gynaecologist, doctor and free thinker whose portrait was painted by John Singer Sargent as "the man with the red coat". The literary part of the book is the writing of Barnes, his style, his composition, his personal opinions about what is happening. He does not take a historic distance to describe and recreate the lives of the doctor and his lovers, acquaintances and society. He comments on it, feels compassion, feels empathy. Barnes acts like a guide who takes us by the hand to come and see what happened there in France and London at the end of the 19th Century, he shows us around, explaining the strange customs some people had, explaining how politics, medicine and journalism worked in these days. 

This is and has been Barnes's area of expertise. As a true scholar of Gustave Flaubert, Barnes knows this period very well, and especially the links between England and France, and especially London and Paris. 

Barnes' description of Pozzi's life is more entertaining and captivating than many novels, while at the same time being very erudite. We can only smile now at the lack of medical knowledge our ancestors or be shocked with horror at the practices they subjected their patients to, but at the same time, this is the period when hygiene became important, when Joseph Lister raised the importance of wound desinfection, resulting in an increase in surgical possibilities. 

At the same time, all these people are humans, wealthy and living in a decadent period, when the morals of the church were being challenged, when people starting living their sexuality differently and without hiding their relations with men or women. 

Barnes must have read thousands of documents in order to puzzle back the lives of all these people with such precision and interest, into a narrative that is never once boring or disorganised or unbalanced. He keeps the content, the interest and the pace in perfect harmony. 

His writing skills and discipline of composition are mind-boggling.