In Other Words The Only Story by Julian Barnes
Julian Barnes’ latest novel, The Only Story, focuses like a laser beam on a single life- defining love affair between a nineteen-year-old youth and a forty-eightyear- old woman. From its first epigraphic sentence (“Would you rather love the more, and suffer the more, or love the less, and suffer t he less?”) t he reader can safely assume this romance isn’t going to end happily. But the long and tragic denouement i s hardly what t his novel is about.
The narrator is Paul, a university student who has returned home to southern England for the summer holidays. His biggest problem is boredom; his great ambition, to shake off the yoke of his very conventional parents, whose marriage, “to my unforgiving nineteen-yearold eye, was a car crash of cliché.”
Determined that he “do” something with his summer, his mother arranges for him to join the local tennis club. It is here that he meets Susan Macleod, the suburban wife and mother who is assigned to be his tennis partner and soon t hereafter becomes his lover. Theirs is not the typical spring- autumn romance, nor even a story of a young man being inducted into the ways of the world. Both are far too English for that. “There was nothing French about our relationship, or about us,” Paul states, recounting the early days of their affair in the clear, straightforward prose for which Barnes is widely admired.
Much has been made of the fact that this novel — the 13th published under his own name — is a refracted variant on his 2011 Booker Prize novel, The Sense of An Ending. The similarities are unmistakable, beginning with the relationship — buried deep within that novel — between a university student and an older, married woman. Unlike that earlier novel, however, which revolves around a narrator who seeks a comfortable distance in his most intimate relationships, this book is the account of someone who wants to live for love. That is t he only story that matters to Paul, and it is a story he will spend the rest of his days reliving and deciphering long after the love has petered out.
The early pages are among the most memorable in The Only Story. Barnes vividly captures a young man irked by family expectation and middle- class respectability: the mother who polices him, the father who prefers to “let sleeping dogs lie.” The dialogue is sparse, but when it comes, the reader i s given a front row seat at the t able, treated to an intimate family scene like some forgotten guest at tea time. It’s the kind of truncated l anguage t hat speaks volumes way beyond t he actual words. When Paul fails to come home one night, his mother drives to the Macleod house at midnight to collect him. He gets in the car, only to find her behind the wheel in her pink dressing gown over her pink nightdress. “I got in, and as we drove my mood switched from pert indifference to furious humiliation. An English silence — one in which all the unspoken words are perfectly understood by both parties — prevailed.”
The mother- son relationship soon vanishes altogether from the book — which is unfortunate, in this reader’s opinion. Their fraught relationship often seems more visceral than much of what follows, including Susan’s piteous descent into alcoholism. For as much as Paul loves her, he doesn’t seem to understand her. The reader can guess at what fans her dependence on alcohol, but as told through Paul’s eyes, her unhappiness and addiction are poorly understood. They take him unaware; indeed, he doesn’t even notice that she’s begun drinking until his friend — a lodger in their apartment — points out to him that she’s been nipping at his bottle.
Barnes is a master at moving his characters back and forth through the years, flashing in and out of time as memory serves. No slave to chronology, he makes the reader appreciate how time changes perspective. Memory, as he puts it, is like an electric log-splitter, in which the log is pushed onto a blade shaped like an ax-head and split “pure and straight down the grain. ... and memory follows it all the way to the end.” It’s beautiful writing, but this book is ultimately about Paul. Even his love of Susan is more about him than her.
And while Barnes moves masterfully t hrough time, the further one gets, the less one cares about his characters. At the beginning, they all seem so alive and real. Their vitality dissipates the longer one spends in their presence. It’s as if the narrator has spent all his passion and life force falling in love — and then devotes the rest (and the book) to analyzing those emotions. Though Barnes explores the most intimate feelings, the novel grows abstract and rather cold. His writing is more analytic than emotion- driven.
By the second half of the book, the rest of Paul’s story is spent, as it were, in recovery — regaining control, asserting oneself, individual maturation. A third of the way through, he writes that “first love always happens in the overwhelming first person. How can it not? Also, in the overwhelming present tense. It takes us time to realize that there are other persons, and other tenses.” And sure enough, the author moves between into the past and subjunctive and the second- and third-person voices. Form follows content.
The ending is quiet and revelatory, taking us into the narrator’s state of mind while showing a man who, for all his insistence of feeling and caring for others, is really alone in the world. He is more interested, ultimately, in thinking about his feelings than actually experiencing them.