Playing love’s game to your own advantage
by Julian Barnes Jonathan Cape, £16.99
THE Only Story is a beautiful, tragic and poignant novel in which our narrator Paul recounts his intense love affair with an older woman from the perspective of his older self.
When we first meet Paul at the start of the 1960s, he is 19 years old and has just returned to his parents’ home in Surrey after a year at university. He has a deep yearning to be different: “The one thing I was not going to do was end up in suburbia with a tennis wife and 2.4 children.”
Ironically it is at the tennis club, surrounded by people he dismisses as “Hugos and Carolines”, that Paul first meets Susan MacLeod, a 48-year-old mother of two grown daughters, with whom he plays doubles.
Susan is in a sexless marriage with the deeply unsympathetic and grossly overweight Gordon who drinks to excess, golfs furiously and is generally, according to Paul, an all-round unpleasant and abusive character. Before long, Susan and Paul start a relationship.
Paul is head over heels in love but he is also proud of the transgressive nature of their affair: “It was a matter of some pride to me that I seemed to have landed on exactly the relationship of which my parents would most disapprove.”
But this is no short-term relationship. Paul and Susan stay together for more than a decade, maintaining their affair under Gordon’s nose and eventually moving in together in London. As Paul recounts, their love is “the only story” of his life: “First love fixes a life for ever.”
The younger Paul is very good at infatuation but less good at empathy. He admits that when Susan leaves her husband, it made her life “more complicated, though I admit I didn’t spend much time on its nuances”.
And while he begins studying law, she is isolated in London and suffering a strained relationship with her family. She is so unhappy that she takes to drink and her life begins to fall apart in slow motion. So the second section of The Only Story, narrated in the second person, becomes a story of the slow estrangement of two lovers.
The maturing Paul slowly comes to accept that “love, even the most ardent and sincere, can, given the correct assault, curdle into a mixture of pity and anger”.
BARNES’S novel closes with a section set in the present day in which he reflects on how his relationship with Susan came to represent the foremost one of his life.
He considers “the brief illusion that he’d fallen into some magical world; then a second disillusionment… was a question of what heartbreak is, and how exactly the heart breaks, and what is left of it afterwards”.
There are a great many hallmarks of Barnes’s earlier novels here from rebarbative asides on the hypocrisies of English middle-class life (when Paul and Susan meet, “respectability was no more shed in public than clothes”) to meditations on the subjective nature of memory and our relationship with the past. Paul is “remembering the past, not reconstructing it… I’m not trying to spin you a story; I’m trying to tell you the truth”.
But throughout, the theme that Paul returns to again and again is the nature of love, here cast against the tragedy of one woman’s life and her jejune lover’s inability to acknowledge the complexity of her inner life before it’s too late.