Inevitably perhaps, I can’t help but compare Julian Barnes’ most recent novel The Only Story with his 2011 Booker Prize winning novel The Sense of Ending: the most obvious comparison being the perspective from which the narrative stems, that of an older man, say, of approximately Julian Barnes’ age – you may do the arithmetic – recalling his youth and more youthful years and the defining events now filtered through time and the iteration of memory.
And whilst speaking of memory, I do remember enjoying immensely The Sense of an Ending; the layers in time, the complexity of character and narrative, and now I wonder whether it is perhaps the development of these attributes that I miss in this new work – but then just as I think this I am not totally convinced I haven’t missed something more.
Try as I may I could not warm to the unlikely protagonists; either individually or as a pair. The radical age difference – Paul is a 19 year old university student, Susan a 48 year old housewife – is, well, radical! Forgive me I have led a sheltered life … an affair, an arrangement, an accident perhaps, but more? Well, I thought, I dare say Mr. Barnes’ life has been much more interesting than mine! The peripheral characters also were abhorrent to various degrees, and in terms of Susan’s husband bordering on the grotesque. And the lineal development of the affair from tennis club to social exclusion to long drawn out disintegration was, well, just too…lineal, and Paul’s recollections of these ten precious years of his younger self that took such a bizarre turn so obviously selective. I did wonder a lot about the things he could no longer seem to recall with any certitude, and why not.
In the end, I didn’t believe this story being spun, and believe me that made me cranky because I love Barnes. And that is why I can’t leave it at that and why on further considering all those aspects of the story that seemed to me to so lack credibility, I begin to wonder whether Barnes is not having me (us, the collective reader) on? Is hiding behind an ostensibly serious, albeit against all conventions, love story and simplistic philosophical musings along the lines of “better to have loved and lost than never to have loved at all”, perhaps a jest, an intricate satire of sorts of suburbia and its social mores?
Satire as another vehicle to explore the consequences of decisions made and the imperfections of memory? I have time aplenty to dwell on this some more.