THE ONLY STORY

Jonathan Cape, 272pp, £16.99, Oldie price £9.99 inc p&p This short novel opens fifty years ago, in a Surrey suburb, where a bored 19-year-old university student falls ‘smack into love’ with a vivacious 48-year-old housewife, with whom he is randomly paired at the local tennis club.

‘Everyone has their love story,’ Susan tells Paul, warning him against assuming otherwise of the seemingly defeated middle-aged. Paul tells his love story in three parts, sliding from first to second to third person as he attempts to make sense of the mess of

Susan’s descent into alcoholism and his own frozen withdrawal. Lara Feigel in the Spectator saw

The Only Story as bearing the close imprint of Ford’s The Good Soldier – sharing with that masterpiece a central character compelled to ask if ‘all these retellings bring you closer to the truth of what happened?’ She praised the book as ‘intense, taut, sad and often beautiful’ and suggested it was the author’s best for several years.

Others were less convinced. Thomas Marks in the Literary

Review complained that ‘Barnes specialises in unreliable narrators, or at least self-deceiving ones, but this novel lacks the traumatic payoff of

The Sense of an Ending or the compelling irony of Flaubert’s Parrot. By the final part…paul has become a ruminative pensioner, dabbling as a cheesemonger in Somerset while playing platitudes about love on repeat in his head…he is a humdrum narrator, his language never receiving the stylistic booster shot from Barnes that might have made his insipidness seem more captivating.’

Theo Tait in the Sunday Times characterised the narrative voice as ‘wry, thin-blooded, precise, teacherly, given to quotation and generalisation’ and verging on the sex maniacal. He disliked the ‘crashing of gears...from high-flown speculation to blokey deflation — the regular eruption of words such as “w***” and “f***” into…rather fussy prose’.