The Only Story by Julian Barnes

THE ONLY STORY

JULIAN BARNES

Pages (hardcover): 272

Date: 2018

“Most of us only have one story to tell. I don't mean that only one thing happens to us in our lives: there are countless events, which we turn into countless stories. But there's only one that matters, only one finally worth telling. This is mine.”

Julian Barnes

On the very first page Barnes suggests (via his latest novel's narrator, Paul Casey) that The Only Story will be an emotionally heavy read, a book that deals with life's most important moments. The premise is simple enough—Paul's nineteen at the start of the novel, a restless young man bored with the stilted, mannered life of the London suburbs in the 1960s. However, the Paul telling us his story is an elderly man looking back on his entire life, not wistfully but with gritted teeth, which gives the entire book an air of nostalgia and melancholy.

Artwork based on The Only Story, made by Cat O'Neil for the Financial Times

Paul is impatient with ceremony and cultural formalities. When he meets Susan, a woman nearly thirty years his senior with a similar distaste for the tedious, he falls in love head-first; he's impulsive and, intriguingly, proud of his impulsiveness. Paul sees his college friends finding similarly-aged mates and he can't help but notice that, comparatively, his love affair seems riskier, bolder.

And it is an affair. Paul learns early on that Susan is married with two daughters, yet she doesn't seem happy with her comfortable life. Her husband Gordon (who spends most of his days eating spring onions, planting cabbages and solving crossword puzzles) is a bore both in the living and bed rooms, if you follow my meaning. They stumble into a semi-secretive romance, and it's this aspect that gives The Only Story the ring of truth. Gordon is aware of their relationship from the beginning and does nothing to stop their meetings, content to putter around his garden.

As their love deepened, I hoped that we were reading about the sort of relationship halted not by a dimming of passion but rather practical matters; after all, it was quite difficult for a women to obtain a divorce in the 1960s. Even when the ever-docile Gordon suddenly becomes physically abusive (though Paul learns later that he had been emotionally abusing Susan for years) and knocks out Susan's front teeth, Paul realizes that she will never tell the police, or even her dentist, the real story.

The Only Story is split into three sections, and the first section concerns itself entirely with their courtship, their love, and the revelations about Gordon. In the second section Paul wisely convinces Susan to run away from her abusive husband and live with him. Few approve—not his parents, nor Susan's children, though Gordon surprises by becoming contrite, ashamed that he has ruined their marriage. Paul isn't particularly concerned about the supposed sanctity of matrimony; he loves Susan, her quirks and her pet sayings (calling him “Casey Paul”, or looking at him out of the blue and asking “Where have you been all my life?”)

The second section may be the hardest to get through—Paul understands, too late, that Susan's occasional drinking has slid into full-blown alcoholism, and that realization changes the entire tenor of their relationship; he's still in college, yet quickly becomes her caretaker, making excuses for friends and marking bottles to “monitor” her intake. Their idyllic life together becomes bleaker and bleaker. Paul (like the reader) is keenly aware that in a sense this is his fault—he broke Susan away from her mundane life. Paul saw himself as a savior, but soon learns that his love is not a cure and that, worse, she seems more miserable than before. Is she still reeling from Gordon's abuse? Is she embarrassed that she's broken up her family? As in life, it's hard to pinpoint the exact cause, but the effect is obvious—Susan is ruining her mind with drink.

One of my favorite aspects of The Only Story is Barnes' startling decision to switch point of view; most of the book is written in the first person, but sometimes he switches to a wise second person point of view, or an even more removed and remote third person point of view. The bits that cover Paul's guilt-ridden decision to leave Susan, after a number of failed hospital visits and therapy sessions, are mostly written in third person; it's not hard to assume that Paul, even after so many decades, is reluctant to directly write “I left her”; living with that fact is difficult enough.

The third section is the most introspective. Paul has gone from telling us tales from decades past to his more recent life. He has tried to move from Susan, which he finds utterly impossible. He takes on jobs that move him across the globe; he checks in with his former lover from time to time and is pained to see that booze has blasted away her memory of their life together. He has relationships that don't last, friendships that end when he moves to the next job.

By the end, we realize that the most painful part of their love isn't that he left her or that they couldn't share their lives together. It's that, because of their age difference and her alcoholism, she fades so thoroughly and completely, from both her own life and his. After moving back to England and setting up a bland, if comfortable, life for himself, Paul goes to visit her one last time at a mental health facility. Though never specified, it seems that by this point Paul is in his sixties, meaning Susan is nearing ninety. By now, Paul admits that a lot of the finer points of their love life together are harder to summon up, and that the woman in the hospital contains no real trace of the Susan he knew. He tries to conjure concrete memories of her, but that part of his life is falling out of view..

It's important to note that this is one of the first books written since the sudden death of his long-time wife, and agent, Pat Kavanagh. Barnes discussed his grief brilliantly in Levels of Life, again using a distancing mechanism (in this case, a section on the history of ballooning, then a section about a balloon operator falling in love with an actress, then, almost reluctantly, Barnes' very personal story of loss) that underlies just how difficult it is to directly face losing the love of your life.

The Only Story is a bleak book; Paul can be wickedly funny, but his tale isn't a happy one. I love the respect that Barnes shows his readers. I don't want the candy-coated version, I want the honest story...the only story.