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.”
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| 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.
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| 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.
