May-october romance anyone?
Booker Prize winner Julian Barnes’s latest novel is The Only Story. “Most of us have only one story to tell. I don’t mean that only one thing happens to us in our lives: there are countless events, which we turn into countless stories. But there is only one that matters, only one finally worth telling. This is mine.”
The “I” in question is Paul Roberts. “At the end of my first year at university (more than fifty years ago), I was at home (about fifteen miles south of London) for three months, visibly and unrepentantly bored.”... “My mother, perhaps hoping that I would meet a nice blond Christine, or a sparky, black-ringleted Virginia ... suggested that I might like to join the tennis club.”
What Paul does meet is Mrs. Susan Macleod, a married woman in her late forties with two grown daughters older than Paul. Remarkably, the two of them hit it off. They progress from Paul chauffeuring Susan in his Morris Minor, to attending plays and concerts together, until they end up spending afternoons at a No Tell Hotel.
Paul is introduced to Susan’s husband Gordon and begins to have the run of the Macleod house, including bringing his buddies from school around. He is also introduced to her friend Joan, a notorious bad picker who has never married, in spite of several romantic entanglements. After Susan tells Paul Joan’s story, his only comment is, “Poor old Joan.”
“Yes and no. Yes and no. But don’t ever forget, young Master Paul. Everyone has their love story. Everyone. It may have been a fiasco, it may have fizzled out, it may never even have got going, it may have been all in the mind, that doesn’t make it any less real. Sometimes, it makes it more real. Sometimes, you see a couple, and they seem bored witless with one another, and you can’t imagine them having anything in common, or why they’re still living together. But it’s not just habit or complacency or convention or anything like that. It’s because once, they had their love story. Everyone does. It’s the only story.”
Eventually, when it becomes clear that Susan’s husband physically abuses her, the two of them move into a house together in London, which is when Paul begins to learn that Susan has a drinking problem. Barnes leads us through Paul’s increasingly desperate efforts to keep Susan from sinking into the swamp of alcoholism, trying to pull her back onto dry land, and then settling for trying to keep her afloat. After several years, he realizes that it is impossible to rescue someone who does not want to be saved, and that by allowing the drowning person to cling to him, she might just turn into an anchor that would drag him down into the muck too.
Paul finally chooses to escape. He gets a job in another country and asks Susan’s daughter Martha to take custody of her mother; surprisingly, she agrees to do so. Paul pays a final call on Joan. “So how are you keeping, Joan?” “As you can see. Pretty much the same, except older, drunker, lonelier. How about you?” “I’m thirty. I’m going abroad for a few years. Work. I’ve handed Susan back.” “Like a parcel? It’s a bit late, isn’t it? Taking her back to the shop and asking for a refund?”
Barnes introduces an interesting literary device which he gets Paul to explain. “For instance, he probably wouldn’t have sex again before he died. Probably. Possibly. Unless. But on balance, he thought not. Sex involved two people. Two persons, first person and second person: you and I, you and me. But nowadays, the raucousness of the first person within him was stilled. It was as if he viewed, and lived, his life in the third person.”
So Barnes switches from Paul’s first person narration to a third person narration, as though there were an anonymous observer watching Paul and recording his actions and emotions. This technique is very effective in creating a sense of distance in both space and time when Paul is away from England and long periods of his life are being recounted. Barnes keeps this up until the final pages, when Paul goes to visit Susan for the last time, and Barnes reverts to a first person narrative.
The first part of the book is reminiscent of the sly, understated humor of some of Barnes’s earlier works like Talking it Over and Love, etc. The rest of the tale will certainly ring a loud bell with anyone who has ever struggled with the heartache of protecting someone they love from being transformed by addiction into a stranger.