An old man reminisces about the great love affair of his life, his affair with a woman 30 years older than himself whom he met and ran away with when he was just 19 and she 48, married and with two daughters older than Paul himself. It was never going to turn out well, and of course it doesn’t. But for Paul it remains “the only story” and he shares it with the reader in exhaustive and ultimately repetitious and tedious detail. This is a solipsistic novel that assumes the reader is as interested in Paul’s great love affair as he is. He muses and reflects and as Susan herself points out “You know, Paul…sometimes I’m really disappointed in you…you keep coming up with these banal comments and banal questions.” And that’s the problem for me of this book – it’s a banal story that aspires to be something greater. But Paul, and by implication Barnes, isn’t up to it. He’s a cold fish. He stays with Susan while she self-destructs but it’s never clear why he does so. There doesn’t seem to be any passion, or even love, involved. In fact it’s never clear what the attraction is in the first place. And more importantly we never hear from Susan herself and it’s even less clear what she sees in Paul. Her marriage isn’t satisfactory but why she should throw everything up for a callow young man seems inexplicable. There’s a hint of misogyny here as well. It’s implied that if only Susan had been better able to cope then it would all have been fine, thus letting Paul off the hook. I felt uncomfortable all the way through this novel, which seems to me to be attempting to be profounder than it actually is. In essence it’s a pretty sordid tale hedged around with cliché and platitude, and ultimately it fails to convince.

Another wonderful novel from Julian Barnes, about love, life, time and memory. I couldn't get enough - it's the kind of book you want to devour in one go. And what an amazing cover!

Sometimes the most impressive writing is the kind that sneaks up on you. Julian Barnes is undoubtedly a great writer with a keen eye for delicacies of character and an even keener eye for a finely-tuned sentence.. The premise of failed forbidden love (here a teenage boy, older married woman, the pressure to conform) and the narrative style (first-person navel-gazing that passes close to narcissism) plus the themes of suburbanism, unfulfillment are familiar to readers of his work but even at the start when The Only Story seemed to be treading over old ground rather than breaking new it was still a pleasure to read. The story of Paul and Susan meeting at the local tennis club where Paul is told that his lack of defined political stance automatically makes him a Conservative (with and sigh of relief from full members) and falling in love is dryly funny, gentle and engaging but not earth-shattering.
In the second part the novel and the writing suddenly emerge as something quite transcendent. The second-person voice is almost impossible to do well, not least because there rarely seems to be a reason based on the reader; too often it [comes across] as a decision based on the author’s own desire to “do something different“. At first I thought Barnes had fallen into this trap, I may even have rolled my eyes a little at the sudden shift but as Paul and Susan’s story transforms from a typical story of suburbanite adultery into a heart-wrenching rendition of Susan’s decline into alcoholism and the slow disintegration of their relationship the second-voice comes into its own in a way I don’t think I have ever experienced before. The ruminative, detached tone of the first part turns from self-absorption into a painful mixture of self-reproach and self-preservation and Paul’s asides to the reader become demands, accusations against himself. The second-person wounds deeply and the sense of pain, of helplessness and of anger that it creates is devastating. When talking about love and leaving Susan’s friend Joan tells Paul

“You’re still in it. You’ll always be in it…not literally [but] in your heart. Nothing ever ends, not if it’s gone that deep. You’ll always be walking wounded. That’s the only choice, after a while. Walking wounded, or dead. Don’t you agree?"

She could just as easily be talking to Barnes’s readers who will be walking wounded long after finishing this piercing story.

I was very interested in the premise of the love story between the younger man and the older woman, as I thought it would be an interesting exploration of taboo, feeling and the transcending of social norms.

Sadly, the book was a dense ramble through the thoughts of a self-indulgent point of view character, with barely any action taking place on the page - much of the novel is description or second-hand relating of incidents through a thick veil of 'I'm an unreliable narrator, don't you know, and my memory is fallible'.

Every single page is a violation of the traditional 'show, don't tell' rule of fiction. I understand that a well-written book and a talented author can break fictional traditions when done well, but this was not one of those times. It resulted in a boring novel which managed to render an entire character's life dull and meaningless., when it was probably quite an eventful storyline underneath the thick stylising

I'm sure there are very intellectual undertones and meaningful reasons why Barnes made the stylistic decisions he did in writing this book, but if that's the case I didn't pick up on those reasons. For example, the narrative voice shifts from first person through second person and third person even through the point of view character is consistent throughout - and I couldn't fathom why this was the case. It didn't seem to have a meaningful reason except that Barnes wanted to show what a good writer he is.

On a sentence-by-sentence basis the book is well-written, but as a whole I didn't enjoy it at all. At a certain point near the end, the narrator talks about someone being 'bullied by reputation, truth should stand by itself, clear and unsupported', and that's how I feel about books, but not this one: a book should stand alone, aside from its author's fame and renown as a good writer. Yet this one, sadly, does not.

Julian Barnes's latest novel sets out its agenda from its very first paragraph:

Would you rather love the more, and suffer the more; or love the less, and suffer the less? That is, I think, finally, the only real question.

And then, soon after we are told:

Most of us have only one story to tell. I don't mean that only one thing happens to us in our lives... But there's only one that matters, only one finally worth telling. This is mine.

But here's the first problem. If this is your only story, then it's the one you have most often told and retold even if - as is the case here - mainly to yourself. The question then is: do all these retellings bring you closer to the truth of what happened, or move you further away?

The first pages of the book, then, hold the seed of the whole novel. First of all, this will be a love story or, if that sounds too sentimental , the history of a relationship. And it's an unusual one, since it features a young man not yet out of his teens who falls in love with a woman nearly three decades older than him. And married with children older than himself. It's the type of affair which even in our liberal times might raise an eyebrow or two, let alone in a conservative London suburb in the sixties. Secondly, this is a novel about memory. Because stories, including (or particularly?) love stories, are shaped by their protagonists and their narrators. And memory and truth are often uncomfortable bedfellows.

Love, memory, truth. Novelistic but hardly novel themes. Indeed, they are subjects which have been tackled by countless authors, not least by Barnes himself in earlier works of his. In this respect, I found this book disappointing, especially coming as it does hot on the heels of The Noise of Time, which I had enjoyed immensely. The age-gap between protagonists Paul and Susan does give this story its particular dynamic but, other than that, the plot is not particularly distinctive.

On the other hand, from a seasoned novelist such as Barnes one can expect a well-crafted work. In this respect, "The Only Story" does not disappoint. Like The Noise of Time, the novel is cast in three parts. In the first section, Paul, now nearing his seventies, recalls the earliest years of his relationship with Susan. The novelty of the relationship, the sense of transgression, that youthful feeling that love will surmount all difficulties are palpable, even if there are spoilers implying that many illusions will be shattered.

In the second part, Paul takes us through the challenging, later years of his relationship with Susan. Interestingly, these darker recollections make him reassess the beginning of his story with Susan and we start to realise that the first part might have recounted through rose-tinted glasses. As the memories become more painful, Paul's narrative moves almost imperceptibly to the second person. Second-person narrative is always hard to pull off, but Barnes manages it nicely.

The third part has a valedictory quality as we are brought up to speed with the intervening decades. The narrative is now in the third-person, although the point of view remains firmly that of Paul, who now philosophizes and ruminates about what life has taught him about love.

It's an effectively structured novel whose artifice is ably hidden behind a likeable, but unreliable, bumbling narrator, who recounts his story in leaps and bounds, dropping spoilers and repeating himself. There are also other effective touches, such as the evocation of the social and historical context of the story.

It is, in other words, a not-particularly-distinctive story, told in an accomplished way.

I thought The Only Story was excellent in some parts but that it lost its way a little. It is, of course, beautifully written throughout with some very poignant observations but struggled to carry the story through to its end.

The story begins with a nineteen-year-old Paul in the mid-1960s in a "respectable" Surrey village, who falls for and eventually begins an affair with an older, married woman whom he meets at the Tennis Club. Julian Barnes uses this as a device to reflect on youth and its lack of care for consequences, on love and on the progress of lives, including the slowly growing crises that may overwhelm them.

For much of its length I found it excellent. Barnes is insightful and slightly resignedly compassionate to his characters, who all seem exceptionally real and well-drawn to me. His prose is wonderful; elegant, poised, sometimes very witty and very easy to read. The narrative is partly in Paul's first-person voice which I thought caught the mind of a middle-class nineteen-year-old at that time beautifully. I highlighted a lot of examples, like this, for example: "I was keen in those days to find hidden motives – preferably involving hypocrisy – behind the obvious ones." Period is perfectly painted in attitudes, language and the general background. He is very good on memory – the idiotic details we do remember and the important things we don't, and it's unreliability. He sums it up well in the phrase, "But I'm remembering the past, not reconstructing it."

The final third of the novel is in the third person (but jumps to first person briefly, which I found simply annoying) and although it's thoughtful and intelligent, it read to me less like the conclusion to a novel and rather more like an essay on the way a life can begin with real passion and ideals and then be lived at a slightly sad, reserved level. For two-thirds of the book I was very involved with the story of Paul and Susan, but the long, rather bleak and melancholy conclusion didn't work quite so well. It is full of truth and insight – but perhaps not really a story.

Despite this reservation, The Only Story is beautifully written and has lots of real insight I can still recommend it warmly.

(My thanks to Jonathan Cape/Vintage for an ARC via NetGalley.)

.“Would you rather love the more, and suffer the more; or love the less, and suffer the less? That is, I think, finally, the only real question. You may point out –correctly –that it isn’t a real question. Because we don’t have the choice. If we had the choice, then there would be a question. But we don’t, so there isn’t. Who can control how much they love? If you can control it, then it isn’t love. I don’t know what you call it instead, but it isn’t love.”.

Thus begins the latest novel by one of my favorite authors, Julian Barnes. I immediately knew, just by reading those words that I will be witness to a beautiful and heartbreaking love story which will leave me, after the last page, fulfilled by the exquisite writing but also spent from suffering along with the characters. I was entirely right.

.“Most of us have only one story (…) that matters, only one finally worth telling. This is mine.”.

The Author tells the story of Paul, a young man of 19 and his first love, Susan, a middle age married woman of 48. They meet in 1963 on the tennis court, where fate brought them together for a double match. They begin to spend more and more time together until they fall irremediably in love.

The novel is divided in three parts, the first chapter is written in first person and relates the beginning of the love story. The second part is a mixture of 1st and 2nd person and deals with the inevitable degradation and end love while the 3rd part, where we showed Paul’s remaining life, is written mostly in a detached 3rd person.

The authors explain his choices to use these narration techniques better than I could. .“And first love always happens in the overwhelming first person. How can it not? Also, in the overwhelming present tense. It takes us time to realize that there are other persons, and other tenses. ”.
“But nowadays, the raucousness of the first person within him was stilled. It was as if he viewed, and lived, his life in the third person. Which allowed him to assess it more accurately, he believed. “

I thought that the change between 1st, 2nd and 3rd person narration to be of powerful effect and it worked very well to confer the intended atmosphere and tension. It was particularly compelling in the 2nd chapter which started in 1st person and moved to 2nd person when the relationship started to face problems and Susan changed. 2nd person is somewhat in between the personal 1st person and the 3rd, which suggests an intermediary state, where Paul’s efforts/failure to save Susan and their love transitions from the intense love and suffering to a more detached form.

If you read The Sense of An Ending, you get to immediately see the similarity between The Only Story and the 2011 Booker winner. They both deal with the unreliability of memory. If in The Sense of An Ending the theme is subtly introduced and we are left to discover it ourselves while reading, here it is expressed, out in the open through narrator’s words.

“But here’s the first problem. If this is your only story, then it’s the one you have most often told and retold, even if –as is the case here –mainly to yourself. The question then is: do all these retellings bring you closer to the truth of what happened, or move you further away?”
“He sometimes asked himself a question about life. Which are truer, the happy memories, or the unhappy ones? He decided, eventually, that the question was unanswerable.”
“So, that familiar question of memory. He recognized that memory was unreliable and biased, but in which direction? Towards optimism? That made initial sense. You remembered your past in cheerful terms because this validated your existence. You didn’t have to see your life as any kind of triumph –his own had hardly been that –but you did need to tell yourself that it had been interesting, enjoyable, purposeful. Purposeful? That would be pitching it a bit high. Still, an optimistic memory might make it easier to part from life, might soften the pain of extinction. But you could equally argue the opposite. If memory is biased towards pessimism, if, retrospectively, all appears blacker and bleaker than it actually was, then this might make life easier to leave behind.”

I don’t know if the similarities were intentional or if there was laziness in finding new ideas. However, both novels are amazing and in the same time similar and different, both worth reading and living.

The Only Story is a story about and powerful love sorted to fail, about hope, shame, unspoken guilt and loss. It is a beautifully written novel, as everything Barnes writes and I consider myself lucky to have been able to read this novel before it was published.

This is the second novel I have read in as many weeks featuring a romance between a very young man and a much older woman. Notable in both is the use of unusual second person narration. In this case the narration switches between the first, second and third person voices and a very effective technique it is too. We see the relationship between Paul and Susan in its heyday (the first person, living for the moment, not thinking too deeply), passing through disillusionment (the second person, conveying accusation or apology) to nostalgic reflection in the third person a couple of decades later.

‘Sex involved two people. Two persons, first person and second person: you and I, you and me. But nowadays, the raucousness of the first person within him was stilled. It was as if he viewed, and lived, his life in the third person. Which allowed him to assess it more accurately, he believed.’

I found much to admire in the author’s discussion of memory. ‘Memory sorts and sifts according to the demands made on it by the rememberer. Do we have access to the algorithm of its priorities? Probably not. But I would guess that memory prioritises whatever is most useful to help keep the bearer of those memories going. So there would be a self-interest in bringing happier memories to the surface first.’

Very interesting insights, too, into relationships and how they change over time and circumstances. I had a problem, though, believing in this particular love affair and didn’t much like the two main characters themselves, perhaps we’re not meant to. The character I could best engage with is Joan - an intriguing back story and some sparkling dialogue. I found myself sympathising with the loathsome Gordon towards the end and I think that is the author’s intention. By the time we get to the end Paul realises (as I think we do from the beginning) that he was overwhelmingly attracted by the transgressive nature of the May-December relationship and then sticking with it however unappealing it became. He must love more deeply than others, just look at the obstacles he has in his way. His later musings of the ‘what if?’ kind and his realisation that Susan’s rather irritating ‘couple’ banter was not entirely exclusive to him struck me particularly.

Plenty to think about here and plenty to recommend.

A superlative use of language and grammar. A gripping tale of love and loss, but unlike anything you've read on the subject before. Barnes finds yet another way brake our hearts.

I'm not really sure what I was expecting from this novel. I have read Julian Barnes in the past and had mixed feelings about his work. I think I was expecting some high minded, literary stuff that would win prizes but not necessarily engage me. It wasn't like that at all. This is a tale of first love, young love, dysfunctional love, the love that shapes a person's life ever after for better or worse. It's wistful and melancholy, very evocative of a bygone era. Written from the perspective of a man at the end of his life, musing over the love story that started his adult life. It's full of problems, dysfunction, oddly distasteful elements which work to create a kind of beauty in the midst of what is clearly quite horrible for large periods of time. I was particularly taken by the author's writing about what it is to live with someone who is an alcoholic and how that can test and distort love. I have experience of this, and it rings very true for me. I found the book intriguing, I never really imagined where it would end up.

Julian Barnes is a great writer, a perceptive one, who sees beyond the surface of the characters he is writing and life's dilemmas and ambiguities. In The Only Story he writes about love, memory and perspective with elegance.

At the centre of the novel is Paul, 19 year old boy who begins an affair with a 48 year old woman he meets at his local tennis club. The novel follows the gradual unravelling of this relationship over the course of ten years, and the subsequent impact on the narrator and those around the couple.

Barnes' writing is clever: as he meditates on our use and misuse of memory, the novel jolts about in time - from the past to the present to the future, just as the mind makes seemingly arbitary connections between our memories.

Despite Barnes' intelligence, at times I felt that the book felt a little too self-consciously analytical. I enjoyed the way the characters meditate on what it is to love, but at times this felt over-laboured.

An enjoyable and intelligent read.

It's incredible, but not so much in the end, how much sadness can Barnes pack in 224 pages. As this is probably the saddest book he has ever written, and he wrote many and mostly they are all sad. That said I think that this is an incredible good book, the way the story of Susan and Paul is portrayed would be indelibly stamped in my mind with the related emotions. I didn't imagine what ride I had in front of me when I read "The only real question".

È incredibile, anche se non poi tanto guardando la bibliografia dell'autore, quanta tristezza riesce a far entrare Barnes in 224 pagine, perché questo é probabilmente il libro piú triste che abbia scritto fino ad ora e lui non ne ha scritti pochi e la maggior parte sono tristi. Detto questo, perché ritengo che fosse un disclaimer necessario, ritengo il romanzo molto molto bello e la storia di Susan e Paul mi rimarrà impressa in modo indelebile nella mente assieme a tutti i sentimenti che mi ha suscitato. Non immaginavo cosa mi aspettasse, quando ho letto il primo paragrafo del libro, che parlava dell' unica vera domanda.

THANKS TO NETGALLEY FOR THE PREVIEW!

Love is not love which alters when it alteration finds...

3.5 stars

Not a line (or indeed sonnet) which allows for real life circumstances, for everyday men and women. Love is different things to different people, as this novella shows.

Barnes is always tightly in control of his words, saying in a couple of hundred pages what others may struggle to keep to double that length, and I admire him for that. This is quite tight but still a complete overview of a relationship over several decades.

Albeit it, an unusual one. Paul is 19 when he meets and quickly falls for an 'older woman' (married) at his parents' tennis club. Their unapproved and unconventional pairing is noticed by Susan's husband, Paul's parents, friends, the community, with very different reactions.

Not merely a short-term affair, the teenager gets to learn about grown-up love and all its potential consequences as he takes the narrative, though I was quite interested to see it from Susan's point of view. Paul grows up through the book, though I wasn't sure I knew enough about him as an adult to feel much compassion for him. He narrates looking back at his youth:
"Would you rather love the more, and suffer the more; or love the less, and suffer the less? That is, I think, the only real question."

Though I'm not sure we always get the choice or the foresight to make these decisions.

I liked this more during the first half of the story, I couldn't really understand some of the decisions and actions taken as time passed, though the ending is poignant and rather sad. And something many partnerships will have ahead of them.

It's not going to be for everyone. Quite an intense story, it may hit home for some readers, and be upsetting.

Mostly a two-hander between Paul and Susan, her husband is quite a frightening and unpredictable secondary character. The portrayal of love varied between seeming very realistic and feeling out-of-the-ordinary and a little harder to identify/empathise with.

I finished it feeling a little down, despondent. It's not one that really resonated with me, but I couldn't really feel a connection to the characters or their situations, though it was fascinating to see the development of the relationship over many years and how age/infirmity can change it so dramatically.

With thanks to Netgalley for the advance e-copy, provided for review purposes.

This felt like a natural progression (although unconnected) from A Sense of an Ending with its older male narrator looking back on his life and loves and a May to September relationship burgeoning at a time of social constraints that must sound archaic to younger generations - but it is much more emotionally powerful than the former title and also more reflective of time past compared to the present. It’s very English, if that makes sense, and there is much to recognise either from your own experiences or those told anecdotally by your parents’ generation. How moving you find this book will depend on your empathetic imagination I think as much of the tragedy is implied and the first person narration holds you at a considerable distance from the character who suffers most of all. It’s not that this doesn’t work but this did introduce an element of frustration as I longed to get into the other chracter’s head. My other slight criticism is that I did sometimes wonder whether the narrator was the character or the author, particularly during the more extensive state of the nation reflections. Overall though, I found this to be a thoughtful and well written treatise on love which I’m sure will resonate with many readers.

This unusual romance is definitely not in the same ballpark as the likes of The Notebook and other such love stories - instead it begins as a pseudo-parody of the younger man-older woman genre - ending in a tragically realistic fashion.

Following the story of protagonist Paul, a 19-year-old man-child, attempts to find his feet in the world by defying social conventions. Enter Susan, a married woman with two grown children even older than Paul. Beginning innocently after joining a tennis club, Paul seems to grow increasingly attracted to the almost middle-aged woman, but is clearly ambiguous about his motives for pursuing her. Is it out of sheer rebellion against his traditional upbringing or just another yarn to tell his university friends? What does become increasingly apparent is that it is not just a summer affair, as things start to unravel over time. The question posed by the book at the end is: "Would you rather love the more, and suffer the more; or love the less, and suffer the less?"

As per usual, Julian Barnes is a unique storyteller, able to adapt his writing every single time. It is vastly different from some of his other works such as The Noise of Time, which is written almost like a Russian classic. This, on the other hand, is written in an honest first-person narrative, sounding genuinely like a happy-go-lucky teenager. While it is not a perfect story, especially as the chronology feels inconsistent, it is an easy read.

A great book. I loved the story and the style of writing. There were strong characters who made the storyline. Highly recommended.

Many thanks to Netgalley and Julian Barnes for the copy of this book. I agreed to give my unbiased opinion voluntarily.

Julian Barnes, next to William Boyd, is a brilliant chronicler of conditions of the human heart and an acute observer of human failures. I always look forward to his new work. His latest book, due for publication February 1st, opens with this sentence: Would you rather love the more, and suffer the more; or love the less, and suffer the less? That is, I think, finally, the only real question.


This line sets the tone for the next 224 pages where we become witness to Susan and Paul’s love story. Paul, age nineteen, feeling bored during his semester break, decides to join the local tennis club and is paired off with Susan, age 48, to start in the doubles matches. What begins as a perfectly innocent encounter between a young man and what we today would refer to as a “cougar”, develops into a life changing relationship, both throwing caution to the wind.


It is the Fifties; Susan is trapped in a loveless marriage with Gordon Macleod and mother of two girls Paul’s age. Despite their huge age difference, Paul and Susan are certain about the depth of their love and never doubt the seriousness of their feelings. When Paul comes close to finishing his studies as a solicitor, they run off with each other to life together but the demands put on Paul as their relationship shifts are greater than he ever thought possible. Barnes chronicles their relationship until Paul’s old age beyond Susan’s death. The voice of Paul as a young and much older narrator looking back on a life lived is very moving and masterfully written.
One of the characters in the book I particularly adored is Joan, Susan’s best friend, whose dry sense of humor and no nonsense approach to life and her friend’s situation is only achieved by someone who has been beaten by life herself.

“We were together– under the same roof, that is– for ten or more years. Afterwards, I continued to see her regularly. In later years, less often. When she died, a few years ago, I acknowledged that the most vital part of my life had finally come to a close. I shall always think of her well, I promised myself. And this is how I would remember it all, if I could. But I can’t.”

Julian Barnes’ latest novel, The Only Story tells the story of the narrator, Paul’s, one true love, through his memories looking back on the story many decades later:

“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. But here’s the first problem.

If this is your only story, then it’s the one you have most often told and retold, even if– as is the case here– mainly to yourself. The question then is: do all these retellings bring you closer to the truth of what happened, or move you further away? I’m not sure. “

Aged 19, at university, living in suburbia, Paul is invited to ’play-in’ at the local tennis club, and finds himself paired in the mixed-doubles by Susan, 48 years-old, married with two daughters a little older than Paul. Her first words to him immediately alert the reader – but not Paul - as to where this story may be heading:

“‘Which side do you prefer?’ she asked. ‘Side?’ ‘Forehand or backhand?’ ‘Sorry. I don’t really mind.’ ‘You take the forehand to begin with, then.’”

But as Paul, narrating his memories, observes:

“Writing all this down, it seems more knowing than it was at the time.
[…]
Perhaps you’ve understood a little too quickly; I can hardly blame you. We tend to slot any new relationship we come across into a pre-existing category. We see what is general or common about it; whereas the participants see– feel– only what is individual and particular to them. “

But Paul’s relationship does follow the path we initially assume – they become first close friends and then lovers. Quite what everyone, including her alcoholic husband and her daughters, makes of their relationship isn’t clear:

“‘You’re her . . . ?’ ‘Godson,’ you reply automatically. Or maybe you say ‘Nephew’, or possibly ‘Lodger’, which at least contains four correct letters in it. “

The story is told in three parts, each in a different person. The first, telling of their story until she leaves the marital home and sets up house with Paul, in the first person, the second, which tells of their years living together in the second, and the latter, where Paul reflects on the aftermath of their relationship in his life, the third:

“It was as if he viewed, and lived, his life in the third person. Which allowed him to assess it more accurately, he believed. “

Another distinctive feature is the style of the recollections, rather rambling and (designed to seem) unstructured - one section is even labelled “a few stray thoughts and memories”:

“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. “

In the first Paul tries to recall the world as he saw it then, for example his assumption (see above) as to the uniqueness of their relationship and his rejection of his parents’ generation (a rejection from
which he exempts the rather ironic and playful Susan):

“What did I dislike and distrust about adulthood? Well, to put it briefly: the sense of entitlement, the sense of superiority, the assumption of knowing better if not best, the vast banality of adult opinions, the way women took out compacts and powdered their noses, the way men sat in armchairs with their legs apart and their privates heavily outlined against their trousers, the way they talked about gardens and gardening, the spectacles they wore and the spectacles they made of themselves, the drinking and the smoking, the terrible phlegmy racket when they coughed, the artificial smells they applied to conceal their animal smells, the way men went bald and women shaped their hair with aerosols of glue, the noxious thought that they might still be having sex, their docile obedience to social norms, their snarky disapproval of anything satirical or questioning, their assumption that their children’s success would be measured by how well they imitated their parents, the suffocating noise they made when agreeing with one another, their comments about the food they cooked and the food they ate, their love of stuff I found disgusting (especially olives, pickled onions, chutneys, piccalilli, horseradish sauce, spring onions, sandwich spread, stinky cheese and Marmite), their emotional complacency, their sense of racial superiority, the way they counted their pennies, the way they hunted for food trapped between their teeth, the way they weren’t interested enough in me, and the way they were too interested in me when I didn’t want them to be. “

A crucial role in the story is played by Susan’s friend Joan, herself victim of a failed love affair, now seeking her comfort in her dogs, the crossword (at which she cheats) and the bottle. She warns him of their naivety and tells him Susan will ultimately suffer most.

A forecast that is born out in the much sadder, at times painful, second part, where Paul suggests he is in need of a book called “How to Cope With Your Middle-Aged Female Alcoholic Lover”. And Joan refuses to act as an intermediary when their relationship becomes strained:

“Point One. I’m not a go-between. Whatever you say stays in this room and it doesn’t get leaked back. Point Two. I’m not a shrink, I’m not some kind of advice centre, I don’t even much like listening to other people’s woes. I tend to think they should get on with it, stop moaning, roll up their sleeves and all of that. Point Three. I’m just an old soak whose life hasn’t worked out and who lives alone with her dogs. So I’m not an authority on anything. Not even crosswords, as you once pointed out. “

Paul – who had once opined that love and truth were inseparable – now finds that the delicious lies to others that once hid the lovers’ guilty secrets now lead them to lie to each other, even themselves:

“Years ago, when you started off lying to your parents, you did so with a kind of relish, reckless of consequence; it almost felt character-building. Later, you began to tell lies in all directions: to protect her, and to protect your love. Later still, she starts lying to you, to keep you from knowing her secret; and now she lies with a kind of relish, reckless of consequence. Then, finally, you begin lying to her. Why? Something to do with the need to create some internal space which you could keep intact– and where you could yourself remain intact. And this is how it is for you now. Love and truth– where have they gone?”

And although he tries to move on, somewhat cruelly one might say, his relationship with Susan inevitably overshadows his relationships with other women:

“And while we’re about it, I may as well say that I once promised her there would always be room in my life for her, even if it was just an attic.’

‘Paul, I don’t want an attic in my life.’ And then she said it. ‘Especially not with a madwoman in it.’”

Ultimately this is a beautifully written and, at times, moving novel. So why only three stars. Well this is just Barnes’ 4th novel since 2000. And whereas the other 3, Arthur and George (2005), The Sense of an Ending (2011) and The Noise of Time (2016) were all distinctive, this feels like too much of a re-working of past territory, particularly The Sense of an Ending, and without the McEwanesque twist that elevated the latter to a worthy Booker winner (even if chosen by a rather unworthy Booker jury).

In ‘The Only Story’, Julian Barnes turns once more to the situation of a young man’s relationship with a middle-aged woman. However, whilst this countercultural scenario is only revealed towards the end of ‘The Sense of an Ending’, in Barnes’ latest novel we are immersed in the decade-long love story – the only story – of nineteen year old Paul and forty-eight year old Susan from the outset. Looking back in middle age, Paul tells the story of their halcyon time together in respectable middle class southern counties England, their increasingly stressful years in Peckham and his desertion as her alcoholism takes hold and his self-preservation kicks in.
As ever, Barnes writes brilliantly, conjuring up the stuffiness of post war little England, the confident voice of the ‘determined to be rebellious’ egocentric teenager, the shame of domestic abuse, the pervasive damage inflicted by alcoholism and the descent into mundane old age. Appropriately, the tone of Paul’s narrative voice changes over the course of the novel as he recalls, dwells and mulls over specific moments and incidents. First person narrative elicits the confident, smug student in Part 1 who clearly feels he is that little bit more daring and special than his peers thanks to his status as older woman’s lover; second person narrative suggests that, whilst Paul is considering his desertion of her and the negative effects of his time with Susan, they are too painful to examine too closely and, finally, third person is introduced to create an emotional distance, to imply that Paul is someone who doesn’t welcome intimacy, who has damaged and been damaged by his unconventional love story.
There is much that is true of the human condition in this novel: we are all affected by past relationships; we all make unwise choices; we all suffer from forms of vanity; we all recognise that we lie to ourselves, and we know that moral choices are not conveniently coloured black or white. Whether readers will hail this as a masterpiece or not may come down to how far they are able to suspend their disbelief to accommodate Paul and Susan’s love story. This develops despite a thirty year age gap. For the most part, Paul seems to drift in and out of the Macleod house with impunity – surely the daughters (contemporaries of his), neither of whom are painted as shy and retiring, would have challenged his presence robustly. And wouldn’t his parents have had something more to say? His university friends appear to admire his relationship with a woman easily old enough to be his mother. Really? This is not the recognisable mind set of the majority of nineteen year old boys!
In the end this is not a love story but a tragedy, one that took shape long before Paul becomes part of the tale. A generation marked by war; a woman grieving a dead fiancé; an abusive husband; a life of few pleasures. And into this springs naïve, self-assured Paul, whose ‘only story’ will inevitably leave him drained, cynical and sad.