A 19-year old student begins an affair which will last 10 years with a married woman twice his age in Julian Barnes' affecting new novel, his thirteenth in a distinguished career.
The setting is hidebound, conventionally drab 1960s England, where despite his rebel streak, young student Paul eases his way into the Conservative-voting tennis-paying set in the so-called Village in which he stays with his parents when home on holidays from university studies in Sussex. The Village is in effect a dormitory town for London, which is 15 miles away, to where men in suits travel each day.
The locale and the kind of people Paul comes across in the unnamed Village are cleverly depicted, with a touch of light, non-corrosive satire. These people are Conservatives, young and otherwise, whom the young and rather lippy student meets on the tennis courts, generic 'Hugos and Carolines' as he calls them. The milieu: stockbroker belt, as they called it – not that I ever met a stockbroker in all my years there. Detached houses, some some half-timbered, some tile-hung.
Early in play, as it were, in a mixed doubles encounter, Paul is paired with Mrs Susan Macleod, a woman in her forties `who was clearly not a Caroline.’ She was exactly my height, which is five feet nine if I am lying and adding an inch.
Somehow, through his acquaintance with the irreverent Susan, an acquaintance which turns into intense love, he ingratiates his way into the Macleod household and even stays the odd night. There is the beer-guzzling, enigmatic but ultimately loathsome husband, Gordon Macleod – nicknamed by his wife Elephant Pants - and the two daughters, to whom Paul himself assigns his own nicknames, Grumpy and Less So. The novel thrives on such nicknames, which act as a kind of distancing agent isolating the unlikely lovers, spotlit on the stage of this brooding mise en scene.
Thus the all-consuming affair begins, founded, as Paul earnestly insists, on the principles of ‘love and truth.‘ Yet part of the charm of the story is its intrinsic air of fantasy, given the improbable ease with which the young man makes himself at home at his lover’s abode - although admittedly there is trouble even on foot of that.
We are not talking the kind of combustible sensual fantasy that is John Banville’s Ancient Light, which also dealt with a young teenage lad’s affair with an older woman. Barnes is more interested in depicting his characters through loaded dialogue, that can yet seem playful, more concerned with describing what Susan and Paul get up to outside of the sheets. Moreover, what they get up to is an elaborately deceitful construct of messy life, for which they themselves are wholly responsible. It's a construct that begins to teeter towards low-key tragedy around the mid-way point in this 213-page narrative.
Paul tells the story himself, sometimes in a rueful, jaundiced first person narrative, switching as the story progresses to the second person, in which passages he actually addresses himself. No doubt there are valid structural reasons for the two-tiered narrative mode; the second person passages are tied to the present tense for a sense of immediacy and drama.
The Only Story is guaranteed some popularity in book clubs, where it will be eminently suitable for opinion and interpretation - one suspects there will be a film adaptation, too. Barnes’ The Sense of an Ending won the 2013 Man Booker Prize for Fiction and Ritesh Batra's recent film adaptation featured a wholly exceptional performance from Jim Broadbent, in the company of Charlotte Rampling. If such a film is realised, ideally from the same director, it too will be a strong one.
