Although the focus of Julian Barnes’s compelling new novel, The Only Story, is a love affair, it isn’t merely a book about love. It is mainly about memory and the vagaries of memory. Nor does Barnes tell just one story. He tells three, weaving their threads together. It’s only after you’ve finished reading the book that you understand the nature of what you’ve read.
At first it might seem that Barnes—the recipient of numerous literary awards, including the Man Booker Prize for his 2011 novel The Sense of an Ending—has written a British variation of The Graduate. The narrative begins in the late 1960s, as 19-year-old Paul Roberts is home from university for the summer and has joined a tennis club where he meets 48-year-old Susan Macleod. She stands out from the other suburban London types whom Paul scorns, along with their middle-class values. His first sight of Susan, standing in the sunlight in her white tennis dress with green trim and buttons and a green ribbon tied insouciantly in her hair, could have come right out of James Joyce’s classic on first love, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man.
Nothing happens at that first meeting, Paul says. But he’s already interested in her and suggests as much to her.
Soon he is playing tennis with Susan, driving her home, buying contraceptives, and meeting her family. Her overweight husband, Gordon, plays golf, works in the garden, and eats spring onions. Her two daughters are older than Paul by a few years and are busy with their university studies; neither of them seems interested in Paul, which is fine. Everything is fine. Nothing bothers Paul. In the blush of this first love, he is overflowing with youthful vitality:
But The Only Story isn’t really just a tale of first love. We see Paul not only as a young man; we also see him as middle-aged and then elderly. Set up to resemble a memoir, the story is told in first-, second-, and third-person points of view, with each section adding a new perspective to what came before. This postmodern technique—telling the story as I, you, and he, with somewhat conflicting accounts—can at times be cumbersome, although it helps to deepen the emotional impact.
Readers who have lived and loved (and perhaps lost) will not be surprised to hear that the heady days of infatuation do not last. Barnes also seeds hints into the narrative that suggest worse days ahead.
In the second section, which begins a year or so later, Paul and Susan are living together and Susan’s nascent alcoholism is dominating her life—and Paul’s as well. Paul suggests that Susan attend a variation of Alcoholics Anonymous, but she rejects the idea because she’s an atheist and the association has a religious connection. They’ve taken several trips to the hospital and the shrink—to no avail.
Paul also begins to remember “some stuff I left out” earlier in the story, which concerns Susan’s husband Gordon’s abusive behavior toward her. But what Paul remembers here seems to contradict his earlier portrayal of the mild-mannered man who works crossword puzzles and was more than forbearing about her affair.
In the third section, which takes place 50 years later—more or less in our present-day—Paul brings the story up to date with the death of his parents, who went from playing a significant role in Paul’s life to becoming an afterthought. They go from being helicopter parents to MIAs who don’t even try to contact their 21-year-old son after he moves out. This is hard to believe and makes one doubt the efficacy of Paul’s memory.
By now, several characters have died, including Gordon—who, in recollection, seems to have changed again from an abusive husband to one who loved his wayward wife. Paul, meanwhile, has “handed Susan back” to one of her daughters because he can no longer care for—read love—her in her demented state. And although Paul is trying to preserve his memory of Susan and to protect her reputation, he’s now wondering what love means and whether he’s ever loved her. He’s also wondering about death and whether he will be ready when it’s his turn to hear the “shutting of the doors.”
Several images from the past are repeated in each section. One of the most compelling concerns Susan’s intent to kill herself: Susan has climbed out of the window. Paul is holding her by her wrists—recalling the gesture of their early love—and in a moment of clarity realizes that he doesn’t have the strength to pull her back into the room. But he won’t let her drop. “They were locked together at the wrists like trapeze artists: he wasn’t just holding her, she was holding him.”
The unstated question is whether she will have the ability to pull him down and destroy them both, a question that will not be answered until the novel’s final pages and only with much remembering and misremembering of the facts and what Paul calls the “counterfactuals.”
As Paul muses several times over this and other scenes, he arrives at a slightly different understanding of what happened. He also realizes that as he grows older, his memory may not be reliable and the remembered event may not have happened the way he thinks it did. It may not have happened at all.
Paul’s uncertainty about events in his past makes the novel seem like a memoir and paradoxically adds to its authenticity—suggesting what Barnes in his own memoir Nothing To Be Frightened Of calls “beautiful shapely lies” that writers invent to tell a story and the way those lies state the truth.
In each stage of his life, Paul tries but fails to remember accurately the particulars of his time with Susan. He wonders whether memory is biased toward optimism or pessimism and finally decides that it is unreliable. Paul’s musings are affected by Susan, who both as a mother figure and a lover often tells him that nothing is what it seems—a notion he at first dismisses but later uses to try to understand her behavior and his own response. Ultimately, none of this helps him to measure the effect of the affair on his life or on Susan’s—which seems to be one of the novel’s chief lessons.
The novel’s other main lesson is to be found in the sound of those shutting doors—in a question that Paul raises several times during the book’s final section: When death comes, will we be ready for it? Or will we, like Paul, feel that in spite of our best efforts, we have not really lived? Or loved?
