Pat is absent from the third section of the book – already lost to the world, not even described for the benefit of readers. In fact it's a peekaboo admission that fiction is fact adroitly displaced and rearranged, since Barnes here indirectly recreates his relationship with his wife. The second section, in which Colonel Fred Burnaby romances the capricious Bernhardt, initially puzzled me, and I wondered if it was just another exercise in historical reanimation, like Arthur & George. "The universe is exact," a friend whose husband has died tells Barnes: our misery when we lose a partner is commensurate with our love for them (though mercifully it won't, if we're lucky, last as long). Their exploits suggest that our soaring, floating happiness – like that which Barnes enjoyed in 30 years of marriage – will have to be paid for in grief when the buoyant cloud deflates. Barnes's "balloonatics" are committing "the sin of aspiration", which destroyed Icarus like the pilot in his early novel Staring at the Sun, they have invaded the realm that God recently vacated. Everything in the first two sections, no matter how wayward, prepares for the third part, which seems so different in its pain and anger. Levity makes up for gravity, and – like Barnes's characters when they puzzle over flying machines with their paradoxical fusion of lightness and force – you are left wondering how the magical feat has been accomplished. But this depression is countered by Barnes's skill and guile in recycling ideas and phrases, motifs that bounce about and recur in startling new contexts until by the end they hold together a book that is at once airy and dense, frivolous and morose. The progress from sky to earth to six feet under is doomy, dragged by gravity like the balloonists when their contraptions plunge back to earth. The combination of forms and styles, slipping to and fro between airy fantasy and the grim immitigable facts of disease and death, really shouldn't work – but it does, thanks to Barnes's deft emotional insight and his verbal legerdemain. Then comes the inevitable descent underground to catacombs and corpses, with Barnes's account of his abrupt and unbearable bereavement. He then settles down to ground in a fictionalised account of an affair between one of these aeronauts, a doughty colonel in the Horse Guards, and the actress Sarah Bernhardt. Barnes starts in the stratosphere, with a semi-documentary account of the dotty balloonists who launched themselves into the sky in the late 19th century. The levels of life are the three tiers of our existence, storeys between which we commute and stories that we tell as we do so. Here the itinerary is spatial, not temporal. Before reaching that dead end, however, it goes for a characteristic wander around the universe, almost in the manner of Barnes's zigzagging tour through the centuries in A History of the World in 10½ Chapters. Levels of Life concludes with a raw, aching elegy. Religion duped us by pretending to vanquish death: are we fools for expecting art to do the same? But the Taj is a mausoleum: like the book, it couldn't keep alive the precious human being it praises.
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