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A review by katekoda
The Only Story by Julian Barnes
3.0
It's an old man's book, I thought, for lack of better definition. The narrator is a sad and lonely old man for whom the only story worth telling is the story of love. SPOILERS AHEAD.
When Paul was 19 he fell hard for Susan, nearly 30 years older and very much married with 2 grown daughters.
You'd think it'll be one of those stories where an older smarter and more experienced woman teaches the youngster the wonders of love and then lets him go to a more marriageable woman shedding a quiet bittersweet tear in the privacy of her lonely bedroom. Being British, though, the characters are too unsophisticated, reserved and sexually repressed for that.
They do run away eventually and end up spending 10 or so years together, even though the bliss runs out fairly quickly. Susan's husband's an abuser, she is a rapidly declining alcoholic, Paul is too young and too in love to help. So he "hands her back" like an Amazon purchase he's not happy with and travels the world in search of nothing much at all.
Far be it from me to judge a quitter, but he doesn't provoke much sympathy, and I wonder why that is. Partly, 'cause he is a pretentious mediocre man with rather shallow ideas about love and life, and partly, I guess, because apart from falling in love he doesn't do anything with his life at all. Even his law career, that he studied so hard for, ends before it truly begins, because he is more comfortable being an office manager, of all things. He reminds me of Stoner in this lack of ambition and spinelessness (is this a word?), also a rather unsympathetic character.
In the end she dies, years after they parted ways, and he gets not so much a closure — more something of a break. Like a person relieved from some tedious duty.
The book is well written (when did Barnes ever not write well?), but it gets a little tiresome by the end. Mostly it's because the protagonist's deliberate lack of personality makes it hard to keep an interest in his affairs. Oh, and the constant switch between first, second and third person seems like too tired a trick for a writer of Barns' calibre. Still, it is beautiful in its own way, and Barnes does write women really well, which is too rare to go unnoticed.
When Paul was 19 he fell hard for Susan, nearly 30 years older and very much married with 2 grown daughters.
You'd think it'll be one of those stories where an older smarter and more experienced woman teaches the youngster the wonders of love and then lets him go to a more marriageable woman shedding a quiet bittersweet tear in the privacy of her lonely bedroom. Being British, though, the characters are too unsophisticated, reserved and sexually repressed for that.
They do run away eventually and end up spending 10 or so years together, even though the bliss runs out fairly quickly. Susan's husband's an abuser, she is a rapidly declining alcoholic, Paul is too young and too in love to help. So he "hands her back" like an Amazon purchase he's not happy with and travels the world in search of nothing much at all.
Far be it from me to judge a quitter, but he doesn't provoke much sympathy, and I wonder why that is. Partly, 'cause he is a pretentious mediocre man with rather shallow ideas about love and life, and partly, I guess, because apart from falling in love he doesn't do anything with his life at all. Even his law career, that he studied so hard for, ends before it truly begins, because he is more comfortable being an office manager, of all things. He reminds me of Stoner in this lack of ambition and spinelessness (is this a word?), also a rather unsympathetic character.
In the end she dies, years after they parted ways, and he gets not so much a closure — more something of a break. Like a person relieved from some tedious duty.
The book is well written (when did Barnes ever not write well?), but it gets a little tiresome by the end. Mostly it's because the protagonist's deliberate lack of personality makes it hard to keep an interest in his affairs. Oh, and the constant switch between first, second and third person seems like too tired a trick for a writer of Barns' calibre. Still, it is beautiful in its own way, and Barnes does write women really well, which is too rare to go unnoticed.