A heart breaking story with a universal theme.

The Only Story by Julian Barnes

My rating: 4 of 5 stars


'Would you rather love the more, and suffer the more; or love the less, and suffer the less? That is, I think, finally, the only real question.'
This is a haunting and beautiful novella about an unconventional relationship and its consequences for both parties - the 'Only Story' of the title being a person's experience of love. It is, says Barnes, everyone's story in one way or another; and for student Paul Casey, aged nineteen, it starts when he's partnered with Mrs Susan Macleod, aged forty-eight, in the Mixed Doubles Tournament at his local tennis club.
In many ways this story is reminiscent of Barnes' earlier novella 'The Sense Of An Ending', featuring as it does an older man reminiscing about the naive young undergraduate he used to be, a passionate relationship that goes awry, and the consequences of a middle-aged married woman's ill-fated affair. But this is my favourite of the two novellas, being more straightforward, and also bolder in its exploration of the relations between men and women.
Over a period of many years, as his relationship with Susan evolves, Paul keeps a notebook in which he writes down various statements about the Nature of Love, periodically revising them and crossing out those he has come to believe are false. It's so insightful, so honest and so sad, and part of Barnes' genius as a narrator is his ability to switch from first to second to third person as the story requires.
There's the straightforward reminiscing - 'At the end of my first year at University, I was at home for thee months, visibly and unrepentantly bored.' There's retrospective self-analysis - 'You are an absolutist for love, and therefore an absolutist against marriage. You have given the matter much thought ...' Then, as events get more and more painful, the narrator distances himself from his own memories by using the third person - 'As an adolescent, he had longed for more complication ... at times, he felt he had had enough of life's complications' - even commenting at one point that 'It was as if he viewed, and lived, his life in the third person. Which allowed him to assess it more accurately, he believed.'
Like 'The Sense Of An Ending', 'The Only Story' proves that a novel doesn't have to be long, or complex, to completely immerse and enchant the reader - all that's needed is vivid narration, thoughtful commentary on a sad story, and good writing.



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