At the heart of a melancholy
disposition is a divided heart. When experienced, things which are presented to
us as opposites - courage and cowardice, calm and panic, love and hate - always
turn out to be two faces of the same coin. A melancholy life is one lived in a
state of fragile ambivalence.
Julian Barnes presents
his love story as an instance of The Only
Story, but then twins the first person novel of the first 150 pages with a fifty
page third person narrative, as much essay as story, which reviews, rows back,
turns on its head, much of what has gone before - at the same time still
acknowledging it as the only story. It’s all very well done. Julian Barnes has
an even, conversational style of writing; he breaks up the main narrative line with
unobtrusive but effective anecdotes, tall stories, and jokes; he doesn’t blind
the reader with science or Literature. I read this book with pleasure and quite
quickly; it’s very good.
The heart of the matter
is the love story which starts out with nineteen year old Paul and forty eight year old Susan,
who leaves her husband for her lover, who in turn leaves her - ten or a dozen
years later - when he can no longer endure her alcoholism.
We are less used to
stories about younger men and older women than vice versa. The etiquette is
different. When I once had occasion to google acceptable age differences, I
found a mathematical consensus: it was acceptable for an older man to date a
younger woman provided she [WA] was at least half his age [MA] plus seven (WA > = [MA divided by 2] + 7).
So a non-sexually discriminatory application of the etiquette would make Susan’s
conduct unacceptable by a margin of twelve years: (48 divided by 2 = 24) + 7 = 31. The result will suggest to some readers that the google consensus
does not apply equally to older women and younger men, since even thirty one will
appear eyebrow-raising to many readers. But it's academic anyway: he's not thirty one, he's nineteen; the local tennis club rightly expels both of them
I did in fact try to
imagine that the novel might have been an inverted, coded version of the love story of
an older man and a younger woman, and I am sure Barnes could write its twin,
even though he has older Paul professing exaggerated distaste for “those men in their
sixties and seventies who carried on behaving as if they were in their thirties”.
Paul or the author protests too much at pages 203-204.
The recessional second
half of this book reminded me of the one which forms the second half of Graham
Swift’s Mothering Sunday (reviewed
here on 8 June 2017) and also an example of the only
story.
