The Only Story review – Julian Barnes goes back to Metroland

When asked what he thought of his son’s books, Kingsley Amis said: “Martin needs to write more sentences like ‘He put down his drink, got up and left the room.’” Amis père would approve of many of the sentences in Julian Barnes’s latest novel, The Only Story, which steps through familiar Barnesian territory, giving us the English suburbs, an aged protagonist looking back over an unfulfilled life, all told in deceptively affectless prose. It would appear that the muted critical response to Barnes’s dazzling meta-fictive portrait of the life of Shostakovich, The Noise of Time, has persuaded him to return to the style and subject matter of the Man Booker prize-winning The Sense of an Ending (2011).

The Only Story opens with a question: “Would you rather love the more, and suffer the more; or love the less and suffer the less?” In The Sense of an Ending, the circumscribed life of Tony Webster was in some ways a response to that question (“I had wanted life not to bother me too much, and succeeded – and how pitiful that was”). This time, Barnes’s narrator, Paul, chooses love, but ends up in the same bitter and regretful place. It’s interesting that Barnes should spend so much of his late career turning over the themes of his first novel, Metroland, published almost 40 years ago. That book allowed its protagonist, Christopher, to end up with some measure of comfort in the banality of a suburban marriage. Here, viewed from what Barnes calls “the other end of life”, there’s only the dull, intransitive rage of a terminally disappointed man.

The book is told in three parts, each employing a different voice. We start off in the first-person narrative of the 19-year-old Paul, who meets and falls in love with 48-year-old Susan at a tennis club. Paul lives in “the Village”, a stockbroker-belt enclave “fifteen miles south of London”. Susan is married to the comically ghastly Gordon, who belches, drinks and munches on onions like something out of Roald Dahl. She and Paul begin an affair, which is presented to the reader from dual perspectives – both the 19-year-old’s hot, naive experience of it and then the sour reflections of the older man looking back half a century later.

The narrative is full of little rebarbative asides aimed at the process of storytelling. “On top of this, there are things I can’t be bothered to tell you,” Paul says at one point. Time speeds up at the end of the section, as Paul and Susan prepare to leave suburbia to set up together in London. We get a sudden proleptic leap forward that strikes firmly home despite – or perhaps because of – the coolness of the delivery. “We were together – under the same roof, that is – for 10 or more years… When she died, a few years ago, I acknowledged that the most vital part of my life had finally come to a close.”

In the second part of the novel the narrative voice segues rather beautifully from first person to second, so that what was a story becomes a kind of accusation. Paul, still barely an adult, watches as the fiftysomething Susan succumbs to alcoholism and paranoia. Susan’s downward slide is charted in painful detail, where the affectless, almost creepy detachment of the narrative serves to accentuate Paul’s horror at her descent. “You are on your own. You have no theories of life yet, you only know some of its pleasures and pains. You still believe, however, in love, and in what love can do, how it can transform a life…”

The third section, in the third person, gives us Paul after ending things with Susan. He lives alone, mulling over the meaning of love, seeking out stories that will help make sense of what happened with Susan. The ending is quietly breathtaking, evidence of the subterranean magic that’s wrought by those seemingly austere sentences.