JULIAN BARNES The Only Story. Reviewed by Carmel Bird

The  latest novel by Booker-winner Julian Barnes shares resonances with The Sense of an Ending.

Some time in the 1980s I read Flaubert’s Parrot by Julian Barnes. I loved it so much that not only did I give copies to several friends, but my own paperback fell apart. Since then I have acquired more copies, and they drift happily round my bookshelves, occasionally being read. Since then I have enjoyed many of the works of Julian Barnes, rejoicing that in 2011 The Sense of an Ending won the Booker.

The title of that novel echoes the words of theorist Frank Kermode when he wrote that novels are attempts to make sense of the ways that people try to make sense of their lives. The Only Story is also a clear response to Kermode’s theory. Not only that, but it covers material similar to but different from the material of The Sense of an Ending. The earlier novel contains, among other things, the tale of a love affair between a young man and an older married woman; the 2018 novel is an analysis of such an affair. Both are dark and sad, tales of terminal disillusion with life and the meaninglessness of death, all told in a prose that is smooth, crisp, uncomplicated.

If you have not had the pleasure of spending time with the style of Julian Barnes, you could start now. I love the way his narrator will suddenly say things such as: ‘I’ll tell you about this later,’ and ‘On top of this there are things I can’t be bothered to tell you.’

The plot of The Only Story is pretty simple, and reveals itself on a straight line from late adolescence to late middle age. The time, to begin with, is the 1960s; the place is 15 miles south of London. Paul Roberts is 19, living with his parents in respectable suburbia. Susan MacLeod is 48. She, a victim of childhood sexual abuse, has two adult daughters and lives with her repulsive drunken husband Gordon in what has been for 20 years a sexless marriage. It is perfectly clear, from the tone at the outset, that this is not going to end well.

Paul is the narrator, and the whole thing is from his perspective, although Part One is in the ordinary first person, Part Two in a concealed first person using the second person pronoun, and Part Three is in another concealed first person using the third person pronoun. First, second and third person pronouns in some places become interchangeable. If anything is gained by this instability it is an insight the reader gets that Paul would like to escape from himself. Of course he can’t.

Paul, and Susan, and another character called Joan, all offer the notion that ‘everyone has their love story’ and ‘it is the only story’, hence the title of the novel. And the novel is a grim attempt at an analysis of the nature of love, in the context of the bleak, relentless downward slide of Susan and Paul. Paul keeps a notebook in which he writes down quotations about love, periodically crossing them off as he decides they are not true or wise. One anonymous quote that he thinks ‘deserves to stay’ is: ‘In my opinion, every love, happy or unhappy, is a real disaster once you give yourself over to it entirely.’ The reader understands that Paul probably wrote that one himself. And he realises towards the end that perhaps ‘love could never be captured in a definition; it could only ever be captured in a story’. Well, I guess people have known that for as long as there have been people, but of course Paul has to discover it for himself, and the novel is his raw documentation of what he has learned. He constantly sees more than one side to any issue, finally being unable to decide which statement is true out of: ‘Life is beautiful but sad’ and ‘Life is sad but beautiful’.

His life is definitely sad, and it’s hard to find anything beautiful about it, even in the early stages of the affair. Four times he uses the phrase: ‘fell smack in love’. Having never heard this expression before, every time I read it, it leapt out at me, and it seemed to me to be horrible. ‘First love,’ he says, ‘fixes a life forever.’ This is such a doom-laden statement, and he is full of those. His first love began in the context of the disapproval of his family, the community, Susan’s daughters, and the hideous violent husband who knocked out Susan’s teeth in his rage. It ended with Susan dying alcoholic, demented, sectioned, surrounded by other patients in varying stages of decay. Paul sees no redemption, that being something invented by phoney storytellers intent on the ‘moviemaker’s bromide’.

A poignant little metaphor suggesting Paul’s opinion of himself lies in the fact that in later life, having acquired some money as a solicitor, he buys a ‘half-share in the Frogworth Valley Artisanal Cheese Company’. There are not many jokes in this novel, so I treasured that one. Life, I suppose, is cheesy. He goes into a little fantasy of working for the company, with a ‘colour photograph of happy goats’ behind his desk.

I can’t review this novel without making further reference to The Sense of an Ending. The dialogue and vocabulary of Paul’s parents and Susan’s husband are often almost identical to those of similar characters in The Sense of an Ending, so that the earlier work kept echoing as I read. I am not making a negative comment here – it’s just an observation on the relationship between the two novels. And there’s a detail that binds the two: the matter of £500.  One day, quite early in The Only Story, Susan gives Paul a cheque for that sum, telling him it is his ‘running away’ fund. He doesn’t understand, banks it, more or less forgets it, but when the relationship with Susan is beyond repair, he gets the money (presumably with some interest accrued) and spends it on prostitutes. That was a sordid little episode. Now, I have to confess that I have never been able to understand the meaning of the £500 in The Sense of an Ending. The mother of the narrator’s ex-girlfriend left it to him in her will. He puzzled over it, I puzzled over it, and I still don’t know why it happened. The running away money in The Only Story doesn’t clarify the matter for me. It might be a sort of author’s little joke. I don’t know, but I think it is.

Some of the most highly memorable sections in The Only Story are small anecdotes, such as when Susan tells Paul how her father-in-law, back when such things were possible, was euthanased by his compassionate doctor. And a story Paul tells about a stranger in a bar who sums up his own love life in a few brilliant sentences, then ‘he stubbed out his cigarette, nodded, and walked off down the beach towards the gentle tide’. The final sentence of this novel is like the fabulous ending to a marvellous short story. Julian Barnes is a master of the throw-away casual stab in the back.

Julian Barnes The Only Story Jonathan Cape 2018 HB 160pp $32.99

Carmel Bird is the author of 30 books, including novels, collections of short fiction, and books on writing, such as Dear Writer Revisited and Writing the Story of Your Life. Her most recent novel is Family Skeleton. In 2016 she received the Patrick White Literary Award. Her e-book of eight short stories The Dead Aviatrix was published in November 2017 and is available from Amazon.

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Tags: Julian | Barnes, the Booker Prize, The Only Story, The Sense of an Ending, UKfiction