The Only Story by Julian Barnes eventually is a disturbing read. The Only Story is a love story, but it is also a life reviewed from its point of ultimate failure. Could things have worked out differently? Would we have done that if we had taken a moment to reflect? Could we have avoided the pitfalls, the moments where things did not go well?
Paul and Susan fell in love. Nothing strange about that. People do it all the time. They live in the kind of middle class, home counties English village that never makes any headlines, but always hides its foibles behind privet hedges and soberly, but always perfectly painted front doors. Life there is quiet. Turmoil and disagreements are generally avoided, and on emerging are swiftly swept under a nearby carpet. In the 1950s, when this story is set at its beginning, carpets were rarely fitted, so lifting a corner to hide something was hardly a task. The consequences, however, could be.
The book has three parts, but no chapters. In essence, Paul is reflecting on his life, especially that shared with his lover, Susan. Each section reflects on events, feelings remembered, encounters shared. Maybe his memory has edited reality, or maybe it has enhanced it, amplifying whatever was felt or not felt at the time. He analyses his own psyche, his actions and reactions. There is much philosophizing, much psychological analysis, some of which might be imagined. Neither we, nor Paul, are quite sure.
In this first section, Paul, like most people of his then age, was obsessed by being young. Lack of years, perhaps lack of experience was a fog under whose protection one felt one could act alone, as if youth were alone in the universe. The consequences would always come later, but they could not be foreseen, no matter how predictable they might be.
Here is an example of Paul’s reflection. “He had a duty to see back to how she had been, and to rescue her. But this wasn’t just about her. He had a duty to himself. To see back and… rescue himself? No, that was stupidly melodramatic. His life had not been wrecked. His heart, yes, his heart had been cauterized. But he had found a way to live, and continued with that life, which had brought him to here. And from here, he had a duty to see himself as he had once been. Strange how, when you are young, you owe no duty to the future; but when you are old, you owe a duty to the past. The one thing you can’t change.”
The complication, you see, concerning Paul and Susan’s relationship is that at the start he was nineteen and she was forty-eight. Strange how the words seem less contrasted than the numbers. It did not go down well in the tennis club where they met, could not be hidden behind the privet hedge and would not fit under any carpet. How they met and developed a relationship occupies the first part of the book’s three sections. How things unfold in the following two sections is for the reader to discover. Let it be said that the path of love is never even, with pitfalls at every step. The trick, the young Paul might have said, is to step over them, to avoid them. As an old man looking back, he knows that the only story is how you cope with the things you didn’t see, can’t anticipate and didn’t expect. Those may floor you. The detail is whose floor?
The Only Story is not just about love. It is about what we do with our lives, the decisions we take or whether we can eventually live with them. Eventually, we all know where we are heading. The trick is to do something along the way. But when we love, we can be deluded into thinking that is the end, the purpose, the rainbow whose end we have found. As we age, we complicate. But looking back, our memory convinces that to have loved is the only story of that matters.
It was Susan, the lover, who “had pointed out that everyone has the love story. Even if it was a fiasco, even if it fizzled out, never got going, had all been in the mind to begin with: that didn’t make it any less real. And it was the only story.”
The novel’s complexity is almost unnoticed by the reader. Paul’s story is so vividly involving that the reader may not even notice that Julian Barnes sometimes slips between the “I” of a first person, to a “he” of the observed. Thus The Only Story could be lived by anyone, readers included.
