The Only Story: Julian Barnes

Love, even the most ardent and the most sincere, can, given the correct assault, curdle into a mixture of pity and anger.

At the beginning of the novel The Only Story from Julian Barnes, the narrator, an aging man named Paul asks this question:

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.

Took me all of a second to answer that one.

It’s the 60s. Paul, the son of a solidly-middle class family, is home from university for the summer, and his mother suggests he join the local tennis club. This simple decision alters the course of his life. Paul, our narrator tells his story, his love story from the perspective of time and experience. Deeply philosophical, the story explores the nature of love, responsibility, choices, and how first love charts the course of the rest of your life.

At the club, 19 year-old Paul meets 48-year-old married, mother of two, Susan Macleod. Although Susan is about the same age as Paul’s mother, to Paul she seems completely different. There is no generation gap; she’s not like anyone else he’s ever met. They become tennis partners, friends, companions and lovers. Susan makes it clear, just a few weeks into their acquaintance that there are problems in her marriage to irritable, blustering Gordon, otherwise known as Mr EP (Mr Elephant Pants).

I was hanging up his clothes and he’s got these grey flannel trousers, several pairs of them with an eighty-four-inch waistline and I held up one pair, and thought to myself, that looks just like the back half of a pantomime elephant.

Mr EP, a man who appears to thrive on being obnoxious, munching a bunch of “spring onions” every meal time, appears to tolerate Paul’s presence, but there’s an undercurrent of nastiness. While gossip rips through the tennis club, Mr. EP seems oblivious about Susan’s relationship with Paul. But is he oblivious or just unwilling to explode his life?

Eventually Paul and Susan live together in London, and while it’s not hard to predict that their relationship will not last–strangely it does for some years, but it’s the slow disintegration of their relationship, the implosion of their love that comprises the centre of this novel. Paul recounts his decisions in hindsight, mulling over his actions, his intentions and the consequences. At times he edits or self corrects his memories, and recalls how they both started lying to each other. His lying, he explains was “something to do with the need to create some internal space which you could keep intact and where you yourself could remain intact.”

Particularly brilliant are the scenes when Susan explains to Paul certain life wisdom–not in a lecturing way but from the viewpoint of experience.

I like Joan I say. I like the way she swears

Yes that’s what people see and hear and like or don’t like. Her gin, her cigarettes, her bridge game, her dogs.

Her swearing.

Don’t underestimate Joan.

I wasn’t, I protest. Anyway, she said I had good hands.

Don’t always be joking Paul.

Well I am only 19 as my parents keep reminding me.

Susan goes quiet for a bit then seeing a lay-by turns into it and stops the car. She looks ahead through the windscreen.

Susan explains to Paul that while Joan, in middle-age may appear to be this washed-up, boozed-up breeder of Yorkshire terriers, that is just an “act.” Joan has an interesting past that nearly destroyed her, and that past is now buried in the trivia of a boring, almost cliched life. Susan explains: “We’re all just looking for a place of safety, and if we don’t find one, then you have to learn how to pass the time.” The act is a way of to “deflect curiosity.”

I’m going to change Susan’s use of the word “act” that to “cover story” (or narrative). Susan explains to Paul that we all end with an “act.” While much later in life, Paul has a story to explain his position in life, looking at his narrative as a series of stories nesting within each other, is his love story with Susan a cover story for his other failed relationships?

I’ve been thinking about this book since I finished it. Some of Paul’s actions–while not exactly murky–tell one side of the story. Paul says that“love is the only story,” but there’s a double meaning here—we only get Paul’s story. We never get Susan’s side of things. Does she struggle with guilt after leaving her family? Was she threatened by Paul’s burgeoning career and the vast age gap? Did she feel horribly guilty after leaving Gordon? Was she tortured by buried insecurities (there’s that mention of Paul snogging another woman fairly early on.) Was her relationship with Paul a symptom of something else (not just an unhappy marriage and no sex life)? Were the seeds of Susan’s destruction sown somewhere in her past–planted before she met Paul?

It seems safe to say that Susan is Paul’s curve ball, detouring him from a relationship with a peer. But isn’t Paul Susan’s curve ball, knocking her out of her safe boring life in Suburbia? Finally there’s Joan who remains a constant figure in both Paul and Susan’s life. In Paul’s final meeting with Joan, she has an elderly dog, a “dog for the road.” I loved that. The Only Story will be make my best-of-year list.

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Elizabeth Finch: Julian Barnes

Elizabeth Finch, from Julian Barnes examines the relationship between the narrator, Neil, and his one-time professor. The novel explores the problems of memory and biography and asks how well can we ever know a person–especially a multi-faceted, private person such as Elizabeth Finch.

Elizabeth Finch teaches an adult education course, “Culture and Civilisation.” The students range in age from 20-40, and there’s a great deal of speculation about Elizabeth, a curious woman of contrasts, and her private life. Neil notes that it easy “to stray into fantasy.” As a lecturer/professor, Elizabeth Finch, or EF as Neil later refers to her, is challenging, yet she provides a reading list which is “optional” and notes “I may well not be the best teacher, in the sense of the one most suited to your temperament and cast of mind.” That last sentence, which seems so casually spoken on the first day, turns out to have great significance.

She appeared to have settled on her look some time ago. It could still be called stylish: another decade, and it might be antique or, perhaps vintage. In summer, a box-pleated skirt, usually navy; tweed in winter. Sometimes she adopted a tartan or kiltish look with a big safety pin (no doubt there’s a special Scottish word for it). Obvious money was spent on blouses, in silk or fine cotton, often striped, and in no way translucent. Occasionally a brooch, always small and, as they say, discreet, yet somehow refulgent. She rarely wore earrings (were her lobes even pierced? now there’s a question). On her left little finger, a silver ring which we took to be inherited, rather than bought or given. Her hair was a kind of sandy grey, shapely and of unvarying length. I imagined a regular fortnightly appointment. Well, she believed in artifice, as she told us more than once. And artifice, as she also observed, was not incompatible with truth.

The novel can be sliced into 3 sections: the introduction (and departure) of Elizabeth Finch, the middle section which is Neil’s long-delayed student essay on Julian the Apostate, and the final section which covers the end of Elizabeth’s career and Neil’s conclusions about his former professor.

I loved the first part of the book as Neil charts his relationship with Elizabeth Finch. Sometimes it’s the hard to define relationships that are the most interesting. EF rather uncannily reminded me of a professor who later became a friend for several decades, and so when I read that Neil intended to become EF’s biographer, I was fascinated. Unfortunately, when Neil delivers his student essay as some sort of post-death tribute to Elizabeth Finch, this entire middle section threw me in the Slough of Despond. I probably wouldn’t have minded reading about Julian the Apostate if I’d sought a book on the subject, but as is, the plot seems hijacked…no … abandoned. In the final section, Neil returns to the subject of EF and the novel revives as he discovers that he was not the only student who maintained a relationship with this very private, exacting person. Meanwhile, Neil tries to excavate details of EF’s private life and finally talks to a former student who has an entirely different opinion of the professor. Ultimately, we are left with more questions than answers, and the mystery of a professor who became one of the most significant people in Neil’s life, while another student remembers her as rather ordinary. What does that say about our perceptions, our biases, our memories?

Review copy.

Duffy by Dan Kavanagh (Julian Barnes)

“That was one of the points about corruption: you never thought about the side-effects at the time.”

Duffy, the first novel in a British PI series from author Dan Kavanagh caught my attention mainly because Kavanagh is the pen name for none other than Julian Barnes, and when you consider how serious his recent novel is, you realise that an author’s writing life consists of very specific phases. I’ve been a fan of Barnes for many years–loved Flaubert’s Parrot and Staring at the Sun, so Julian Barnes writing a crime series?… I’m in. The series was published back in the 80s, and that probably explains why the tone reminded me so much of Before She Met Me, a Barnes novel published back in 1982.

Duffy begins very strongly with a bizarre home invasion. Mrs McKechnie, a middle-class woman who would seem to have no enemies whatsoever is tied up and cut by two men. It’s a very professional job (except for what happens to the cat), and the incident seems to be a message for Brian McKechnie, a London businessman who sells party items at his drab little London office. Under the threat of additional violence, McKechnie is then systematically squeezed for cash; it seems to be a case of blackmail as the perps know that McKechnie’s “mistress [who] doubled as his secretary,” but if it’s simple blackmail then why the home invasion and the violence towards McKechnie’s innocent–albeit dull–wife? The local Guildford police are mystified by the case and consider the incident the “work of a maniac, pair of maniacs,” while the London police obviously don’t give a toss.  Enter PI Duffy, a bisexual ex-copper set up on vice charges and drummed out of the force in disgrace.

Life for Duffy has been going downhill since he left the force. He’s hobbled together a PI firm that mostly dabbles in petty jobs, and while he manages to pay the rent, his relationship with his girlfriend, Carol, never recovered. When he’s contacted by McKechnie to investigate the identity of the man behind the pressure, Duffy steps back to Soho on to his old turf– hookers, peep shows, porno films, and porn mag shops, and once Duffy starts digging he realizes that his unresolved past is connected to the McKechnie case.

In spite of its subject matter, Duffy has a light, ironic and amusing tone. This is partly Kavanagh’s style but it’s also the colorful characters who step across Duffy’s path. Everyone in the sex biz is a professional here, and that includes an aging workhorse hooker, and a motley bunch of peep show girls, and there’s even a gang boss whose taste for decorating could be amusing if he weren’t so vicious. Duffy once worked vice, but now he’s just another customer cruising through the tacky sex shops of Soho where sex isn’t glamorous or even exciting–it’s just damn hard work.   If you’re the type who’s offended by the Blue World, then this is not a book for you–if however, you have no problem with Duffy attending, and sharing details of peep shows and moronic porn films, then you may enjoy this off-beat PI tale:

He glanced at the rack of Big Tit mags, whose publishers had always seemed to work harder at the titles of their mags. D-Cup was still going strong, he noted, and so was 42-Plus. Bazooms was there too, making tits sound like ballistic missiles, and a new one called Milkmaids.

At one point, Duffy sits in on a porn film, and his description of the thin, ridiculous plot is really very funny, but best of all, for this reader is Duffy’s explanations for just how a copper becomes corrupt:

Still, every year around the Golden Mile brought different temptations. He knew how it happened: you didn’t take the free booze even if everyone else did; you didn’t take the first girl you got offered; you turned down the smokes and the snort; and then something quite trivial happened, like you asked for a couple of days to pay at the bookie’s. Quite suddenly, the place had got you. It wasn’t necessarily that there was a particular gang always on the look-out to bend coppers (though sometimes there was); it was somehow the place that got you. It was one square mile of pressure, and everyone had a weak point.

Duffy, a man with a fetish for neatness, makes an interesting series character. He knows how to BS the punters who want all the bells and whistles of PI work, but nevertheless he takes his job very seriously. The novel argues that working vice, stepping in a world in which every imaginable desire is for sale, is a corrupting environment which will stain any copper who lingers there long enough.

Review copy