All love is, in some ways, a celebration of the human spirit. To embark on the choppy waters of rapturous love, undaunted by the sea of shipwrecks, is to validate — every time — the triumph of hope over experience. More so when, as happens with protagonists Paul and Susan, it is a love that dare not speak its name.
He, a 19-year-old university student; she, a 48-year-old married woman and a mother of two; they, in London’s suburban “stockbroker belt”, sometime in the 1950s. Their love was by its very nature disruptive, cataclysmic; but then, if it were not, it may not have been love, would it have?
In The Only Story , Julian Barnes, arguably one of fiction’s most elegiac cartographers of the heart and of the human condition, returns to his ‘first love’, the Metroland of his debut novel, with a haunting narrative of an audacious love — and a distant memory of it — mapped over decades.
The uncreasing of a frown
Fusing clinical efficiency of prose with languid lyricism, Barnes lays bare the anatomy of a heartache, from a time when love’s infinite possibilities render lovers carefree until the time when all that is left of the Grand Emotion is a scar tissue. “I was nineteen, and I knew that love was incorruptible, proof against both time and tarnish,” says Paul, in the first flush of love — or, rather, the flush of first love. It was, he ventures, like the vast and sudden uncreasing of a lifelong frown.
The question, to which Paul returns, over the span of decades, is this: “Would you rather love the more, and suffer the more; or love the less, and suffer the less? That is, I think, the only real question.”
The answer, to some, may be that you don’t always have a choice — and even if you do, you don’t always exercise it in ‘rational’, suffering-minimising fashion.
With the power of hindsight, Paul reflects on the permanence of that first love’s influence. First love, he reckons, “fixes a life for ever… It may not outrank subsequent loves, but they will always be affected by its existence. It may serve as model, or as counterexample. It may overshadow subsequent loves; on the other hand, it can make them easier, better. Though sometimes, first love cauterizes the heart, and all any searcher will find therefore is scar tissue.”
First love, first person
Soaring high on love’s light wings, lovers may not be fully aware of the grammar of passion, but, as Barnes observes, first love always happens overwhelmingly in the first person — and in present tense. It takes us time to realise that there are other persons, and other tenses.
And just as lovers wrapped up in themselves may shut out the world, Barnes’s narrative in the first one-third of the novel sways to the urgent, feverish I-me-myself cadence of Paul and Susan’s relationship.
By the time the narrative switches to London and to the second person, realisation dawns on the cohabiting couple that loving each other does not necessarily lead to happiness. And that you cannot outrun your pre-history, which is central to all relationships.
The curdling
Paul doesn’t quite forsake love, not yet, not even when Susan compensates for the dislocations in her life — which are admittedly harsher on her than on him — by seeking solace in drink. But he bears the guilt of knowing that where once he imagined he was ‘rescuing’ Susan from a loveless marriage, he may have accentuated and accelerated her isolation.
From there onwards, there is an inevitability to love’s end-game, which is played out in the third person, symbolising the distance that has crept up between the two. Paul makes the terrifying discovery that even the most ardent and the most sincere love can, given the correct assault, curdle into a mixture of pity and anger. Worse, he realises to his shock, the emotions that slip in in its place are just as forceful — even as violent — as the love that earlier colonised every fibre of his being.
The only story
“Everyone has their love story,” Susan once tells Paul. It may have been a fiasco, it may have fizzled out, it may never even have got going, it may have been all in the mind. But it’s their story, she says. “It’s the only story.” This, then, is Paul and Susan’s story.
And Barnes, working with the clinical precision of a cardiac surgeon, lays open the affairs of their heart with a wrenching narrative that, even when it doesn’t quite validate the redemptive power of love, is curiously therapeutic.
The nature of relationships may be that there always seems to be an imbalance of one sort or another. And yet, though lovers be lost, love is not.
venky.vembu@thehindu.co.in
