Cressida Connolly
Peering into the Croc's Larder
Nothing to be Frightened of
By Julian Barnes (Jonathan Cape 250pp £16.99)

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I can't think of a nastier way to die than in a crocodile's larder. Imagine the scene: first of all you get bitten by a crocodile, then shaken until you lose consciousness. After that you are pulled under water and dragged into a specially created lair, within the bank of the river, but slightly above water level. You awake here, surrounded by putrefying carcasses, and realise that your destiny is to become another of their number. Then you die (suffocation? bleeding to death from your wounds?) and get eaten. You may even be eaten first.

Most people are either ignorant of crocodiles' larders, or do not allow themselves to become unduly troubled by the thought of them. But those of us cursed with a morbid disposition can spend quite a lot of our time fretting about them. Julian Barnes is clearly such a man, for he talks about croc larders in Nothing to be Frightened of. This is a sort of memoir, in which Barnes introduces us to his parents, his brother and some of the writers he prefers; but mostly it is about his fear of death.

Having turned sixty, and after watching his parents decline, both of them the victims of debilitating strokes, he is much given to dark imaginings about his own end. He recounts the deaths of favourite writers: Flaubert, Zola, the Goncourt brothers, Jules Renard. From these accounts he comes to the unsurprising conclusion that no one is ever ready for death, nor able to predict its coming. He worries about his own. Will it hurt? Will he die in character, or will his personality become traduced by senility, brain damage or dementia? Will he be able to face death with courage, or at least without panic? And will there be anything after death?

'I don't believe in God, but I miss Him,' begins the book. Barnes is a tolerant unbeliever, observing that 'missing God for me is rather like Being English: a feeling roused mainly by attack.' Not for him the dogmatism of Dawkins: indeed, he is amused by imagining 'the fury of the resurrected atheist'. He has never been to a church service - the social duties of christenings, weddings and funerals aside - but he is moved by sacred music. Nevertheless he feels that 'pretending to beliefs we don't have during Mozart's Requiem is like pretending to find Shakespeare's horn jokes funny'. But is it? One is an attempt to enter into a sacred mystery, surely; the other is being false about something trivial. Not the same thing at all.

That is what makes this book so enjoyable: there's plenty to argue with. Julian Barnes is a delightful companion and much of the book (its informal tone included) is like an extended and very interesting conversation. Alas, many of us seldom speak so intimately about death and its terrors; perhaps we would be less frightened if we did. So it is not only from a sort of tabloid hunger for gossip that I rather resented certain of Barnes's devices, in particular his habit of supplying the full names only of dead people, while his extant friends and relations are referred to by just an initial. To address the reader directly, as a confidant, but not to name the real-life friends with whom you have discussed such matters, is withholding and coy. Death is too big to be precious about. Even his barely mentioned and never-quoted wife is referred to as 'P'.

We learn rather little about Barnes himself. He likes food and books, and is a Francophile; he has a wife, friends, an older brother and two nieces. He enjoys music, the arts, sport and travel. It's surprising, from this very unsentimental account, to learn that his brother has always marked out Julian as the soppy, emotional one while he, a philosopher, sees himself as the brains of the family. Their mother delivered what must rank as one of the best maternal put-downs ever: 'One of my sons writes books I can read but can't understand, and the other writes books I can understand but can't read.'

When he writes about his parents he is at his best, a master of the telling detail. His mother's obsession with manicuring her fingernails reveals her solipsism. 'Would you rather go blind or deaf?', she asks her son: her own answer is deaf, so that she could still do her nails. When she is in a nursing home, following a stroke, the author notes that the nails on her non-functioning arm continue to grow, while the fingers become coarse and thick 'like carrots'. His father, sweet tempered, reticent in a Parker Knoll chair, is evidently the one he loved. But his mother's death, coming second, hits him harder: 'His death was just his death; her death was their death.' Whatever his brother may think, Julian doesn't come across as soppy here: 'I know that being someone's child involves both a sense of nauseating familiarity and large no-go areas of ignorance', he says.

At one stage Barnes proposes that believers and atheists be submitted to brain scanning, to see how each group responds to religious art. A similar experiment occurs to me: that pulses and brainwaves of parents and non-parents be measured, to see which are more frightened of their own death. 'Non-death-fearing friends with children occasionally suggest that I might feel different if I were a parent myself', he writes. He surmises that parents are less afraid, because they feel they will be 'carried on' in some way by their children. But this isn't it. It's that you love your children, quite literally, more than your own life. Your prayer, your most fervent hope, is that they will outlive you. Even so, the crocodile's larder never entirely loses it terror.

Cressida Connolly is the author of 'The Happiest Days: Short Stories', published in 1999, and more recently 'The Rare and the Beautiful', a biography of the Garman sisters published in 2004 (both Fourth Estate).