tl;dr

My first taste of Julian Barnes and I loved it.  This has to be in the running for a Booker nomination later in the year.

opening remarks

Julian Barnes is another gaping, abyss-sized hole in my reading life.  Fortunately, the release of his new novel, The Only Story, provides me with an opportunity to paper over that orifice.

knee-jerk observations

“Vocal, incompetent cricket” and “donkey cocks”.  That’s a paragraph I can wholeheartedly endorse:

Not to get too personal but, those were the days…

In the opening pages of the novel, Paul outlines the rules of his story.  He won’t talk about the weather because it’s not essential.  Similarly, he won’t discuss what he studied at University or what he ate or the clothes he wore.  Not because he’s forgotten but because none of it adds depth to the story of his love affair with an older woman (she was 48, he was 19).

And yet there’s a part of Paul that – as this excerpt suggests – wants to remember those minor details, the set-dressing as he describes it.  His assertion that he’s not telling a story but rather telling the truth comes from the naive standpoint that memory can recall events as they happened, as distinct from what memory indeed does, which is fill in the gaps with set-dressing.

There’s quite a bit of foreshadowing, a suggestion that things either get nasty or tragic at a later date.

The contradiction of not wanting to provide detail… “both are meaningless to me”… but providing it anyway is an interesting quirk of Paul’s recollections.  Is there more to it, though?

This excerpt is part of an extended rant about Paul refusing to grow-up.  I’d love to quote it in full because it’s rather good and very funny, but it’s also long.  Instead here are Paul’s views on how adults speak about and treat the opposite gender:

I don’t want this to be true – that our default state is to panic, mitigated only by rules and conventions, “jokes and routines” – and yet I can’t help but recognise that once we reach adulthood, a state of mind Paul is looking to avoid, the pin is pulled from the panic grenade.

Paul points out in the first part of the novel that memory has this nack of prioritising the good memories before the bad. I’m not sure how true that is, but, for the purpose and structure of this book, it’s certainly the case. Thus, part two is much darker in tone as we learn that Susan, Paul’s ‘older woman’, was consistently abused and beaten by her husband. Because he’s in his early twenties Paul has little idea how to react as evidenced by his views on domestic violence:

Barnes’ novel is set in the 60s, but Paul’s observation here about the unwillingness of the abused to speak up against their attacker – especially when that attacker is someone who is meant to love and care for the victim – is true today as it was then.

There’s a point early in the second part where Paul’s story shifts from the first person to second person, from “I” to “you”.  I didn’t notice it at first, but the change kicks in (more or less) when Paul and Susan decide to leave the suburbs and head off to London.  This is a turning point for Paul, one where he feels the need to distance himself from his own story.  It’s no coincidence then that this is where his memories of the relationship take a darker turn.
Susan has been in decline for some weeks, a mix of alcoholism and depression.  Paul, who isn’t sure how to cope or react, who is finding himself drifting away from Susan even though he still loves her, accompanies her to the GP.  And while he sits in the waiting room and thinks about his mates who “(mostly) have girlfriends and (mostly) have peer sex” he has the following epiphany:

Part Three of the novel and we’ve now transitioned to third-person.  A further attempt by Paul to distance himself from the memories that unfold.

The Gist Of It

The thesis of Julian Barnes new novel, as suggested by the title, is that each of us only has one story that’s worth telling.  This is Paul’s story, and it’s important to keep that in mind, to recognise that while Barnes might change the point of view from the first person to second to third, this is a world filtered through Paul’s experience and his sensibilities.

I say this because one of the criticisms that could be levelled at The Only Story is the manner in which Susan is treated.  We view her horrible decline into alcoholism and depression through Paul’s inability to cope.  We never get Susan’s side of the relationship; we never understand her psychology beyond what Paul tells us.  As the novel progresses, she becomes less of a person and more an embodiment of Paul’s guilt and shame.  But that’s the point.  This isn’t Susan’s story.  To add her perspective, to give her a voice, would be providing an insight into her character that Paul was never privy too.

That’s not to say that Susan is a thinly drawn prop, one of the strengths of the novel is how alive she is, especially in the first part of the narrative where the relationship is new, exciting and a little scandalous given the gulf in age.  Here Paul provides a first-person account, and while he eschews detail he doesn’t hold back in his descriptions of Susan, her look, her humour, her attitudes.  It makes it all the more awful when she does start to fall into a deep depression.

Still, I can appreciate there will be those put off by another novel where an older man reflects about his past and his one significant love, because haven’t we been here before? (I gather that Barnes may have been here before).  For me, it’s all about the strength of the writing.  Barnes smart change in perspective, his picking apart the nature of memory, his sardonic sense of irony, all of it comes together in a work that’s utterly compelling even as it charts the most miserable of love stories.  I don’t believe we only have one story to tell, and I also don’t agree that we are forever influenced/scarred/moulded by our first true love, but Barnes, with the strength of his prose persuaded me even if it was only for the duration of the novel.

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