Julian Barnes, _The Only Story_

 STRUCTURALLY, A DEAD ringer for Barnes’s previous novel, The Sense of an Ending. The narrator in old age recalls decisions and actions of his youth that seemed sufficiently justified at the time, even righteous, but that look shockingly and shamefully different in the light of later experience and information.

Paul, 19, enters a mixed doubles tournament at the tennis club his parents belong to. He is randomly paired with Mrs. Susan Macleod, 29 years his senior. They fall in love. Paul’s parents are horrified, as are Susan’s three adult daughters and of course Mr. Macleod, who it turns out is alcoholic and abusive. With the world against them, they bet their lives on love and run off to London to live together.

And live happily ever after.

Ha!

No, in fact, they enter a doom spiral not long after moving to London. Things end badly. Very badly.

Barnes pulls off a remarkable trick with pronouns. In Part One, the falling-in-love part, Paul naturally refers to himself in the first person, “I” and “me.” In Part Two, set in London, he drifts into referring to himself in the second person,, “you,” as one does when trying to present one’s own perhaps questionable behavior as what any normal person might do, e.g., “It’s like when you lose that month’s rent money at poker,” or, to quote from the novel, “You don’t, at bottom, think of alcoholism as a physical disease. You might have heard that it is, but you aren’t really convinced.”

And then, in Part Three, the grim aftermath, Paul becomes “he”: “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.” 

Yet this catastrophe remains the one time in Paul’s life that he was unmistakably in love. Does that redeem  his story? Is it better to have loved and gone down in a flaming doom spiral than never to have loved at all? The novel doesn’t answer that question, but it’s a good question. And this is another final novel from the best English novelist of his generation.