Most of us have only 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.
The Only Story is as much about tone as content, and while the actual plot rather broke my heart, it was Julian Barnes' genius at mood-crafting that overwhelmed me on every page. This book is sad and funny and frustrating and wise; a love story with a tragedy at its core that easily flips pity into contempt; and while that may be a common enough story, it's a lens on base humanity that can never be refocussed too often. This is everything I like in a book
Everyone has their love story. Everyone. It may have been a fiasco, it may have fizzled out, it may never even have got going, it may have been all in the mind, that doesn't make it any less real. Sometimes, it makes it more real. Sometimes, you see a couple, and they seem bored witless with one another, and you can't imagine them having anything in common, or why they're still living together. But it's not just habit or complacency or convention or anything like that. It's because once, they had their love story. Everyone does. It's the only story.In a morally suffocating suburb of London in the 1960's, Paul is a nineteen-year-old university student, home for the summer term, and to get him out of the house and interacting with the better sorts, his mother signs him up for a temporary membership at the local tennis club. Random lots are drawn for a mixed doubles tournament and he is paired with Mrs. Susan Macleod: a forty-eight-year-old married mother of two daughters, who happen to both be older than Paul himself. Susan is snarky and brash, and burdened as she is with a dull and lumpy hothead of a husband, Paul finds himself equally attracted to and protective of the lady with the green-trimmed tennis outfit and the rabbity teeth. The love affair that begins is nothing like The Graduate (if, like me, that's what you'd be expecting from this set-up), and the plot that ensues involves enough surprises that I'll not say anything more about it.
I suppose I could do some real-life research – look for old postcards in the central library, or hunt out the very few photos I have from that time, and retrofit my story accordingly. But I'm remembering the past, not reconstructing it. So there won't be much set-dressing. You might prefer more. You might be used to more. But there's nothing I can do about that. I'm not trying to spin you a story; I'm trying to tell you the truth.Barnes employs plenty of literary tricks: having the late-in-life Paul musing on the nature of history and memory, he concludes that we tend to remember the happy bits first. So, after relating all the happy bits of his love story with Susan, he then goes back and fills in some of the stresses and warning signs; moves on to the real life of ever after. The voice shifts between first, second, and third person points-of-view – but we are always aware that it is Paul talking, even when distancing himself from himself. And by going over and over the same formative scenes, Paul stresses how his relationship with Susan establishes the “prehistory” that he will bring to every subsequent relationship: there's nothing linear or straightforward in this story, but that's how memory works; that's how the stories we tell ourselves about ourselves work. This is also a coming-of-age story: Paul is nineteen in the beginning, and Barnes does a wonderful job of capturing the emotions and motivations and impatience to grow up and get on with one's life that happens at this age (in this regard, I was reminded of Ian McEwan's On Chesil Beach). As Paul is looking at all of this in retrospect, he can pretty much pinpoint when it was he finally did make the leap to full adulthood, and from this far perspective, he can insert the pearls of wisdom he formed from his pain over the years:
Sad sex is when you feel you are losing all touch with her, and she with you, but this is a way of telling one another that the connection is still there, somehow; that neither of you is giving up on the other, even if part of you fears that you should. Then you discover that insisting on the connection is the same as prolonging the pain.I really did like everything about this book – the format and the humanity, and most of all, the mood – and while I didn't always like the way it made me feel, I'm always a fan of a book that makes me feel anything at all.
