Love that survives death in Pulse

"Falling in love is the most violent expression of taste known to us," the narrator quotes approvingly in one of Julian Barnes's new stories, having told us how Garibaldi fell in love at first sight with his future wife when he saw her through a telescope. The liberator, cruising the coast of Brazil in 1839, put ashore at once and searched for the dusky beauty he had spied on: the very first thing he said to her when they met was "You must be mine".

The violence of such a coup de foudre appeals to Barnes profoundly: it emphasises love's irrationality and explains some of the helplessness we feel when the blow falls. Love is as strong as death, and often outlasts it, Barnes keeps telling us, for the pulse that runs through this subdued and poignant book is that of continuity and fidelity — the raised pulse of the first flash of recognition becoming the shared pulse of lives lived together. In the title story, the narrator's failed marriage is seen in the context of his parents' long and happy one as they face death and separation; in Marriage Lines, a widower revisits Orosay, hoping to ease his grief with memories of happier times there, only to find that grief is now "in charge of him". Even the stories of rockier love affairs, Gardener's World and Trespass, are more about thwarted continuity than bad initial choices.

For Barnes's hapless middle-aged male protagonists, there are few certainties in love and the women they fall for are hard to get, hard to hold on to (like the rambler in Trespass), or harbouring secrets (like the Eastern European waitress in East Wind). Readers craving Barnes's characteristic wit and sparkle will find it in his evocation of the literary festival circuit, Sleeping With John Updike, about two ageing women writers who have been rivals for fame and various men: "each had had a little more success than they had anticipated, but less, looking back, than they thought they deserved". One considers the other's change of style: "Nowadays it was all well-cut trouser suits with a cashmere sweater and a silk scarf knotted around the tortoise neck. Back then it had been more like someone holding up a fruit bowl in your direction."

The stories with historical and factual backgrounds, The Limner, about a deaf painter taking his revenge on an ungrateful client, Harmony, in which a blind pianist is cured of her blindness by mesmerism, and Carcassonne, a brilliant almost-essay about taste and choice, echo the drollery and erudition of A History of the World in 10½ Chapters and Flaubert's Parrot, but the predominant tone here is melancholic: this is a book very much in the minor key.

The personal tragedy that haunts Pulse, the sudden death in 2008 of the author's wife, Pat Kavanagh, is anticipated with ghastly accuracy in Marriage Lines, first published in 2007, and her loss defined in Complicity, a story about the first touch of two lifelong lovers. Like Barnes's eloquent rant about mortality, Nothing To Be Frightened Of, published a few months before his wife's death, Marriage Lines now seems to have a premonitionary quality beyond the usual black ironies of how life double-bluffs art. Like the novelist narrator of Carcassonne who has difficulty incorporating a true story into his fiction, Barnes must feel that literature can rarely contain "life's astonishments".