"The Only Story" by Julian Barnes

The novel by the British writer Julian Barnes "The Only Story" is about the love of a young man and a mature woman who left a mark in the soul of a hero for life. I believe that this book - on the verge of prose and essay writing - is intended for slow, thoughtful reading.

The older Julian Barnes, the thinner, drier, poorer the action, and smarter his prose. In "The Only Story" he climbs to the very icy and inaccessible peaks of writing, where it is difficult to breathe, but the view opens dizzying and truly beautiful. In a sense, "The Only Story" continues Barnes’s "The Sense of an Ending", the previous one, as flawless in form and imbued with the same quiet despair. Only this time, the love story of a young man, almost a boy, and an adult woman, in "The Sense of an Ending" brought to the fields, turns out to be the focus of the author’s attention — and, accordingly, the reader’s attention — and the degree of despair (still quiet and pointed non-demonstrative) becomes almost unbearable.

19-year-old Paul, a native of a bourgeois London suburb, arrives home for the first university vacations. The father and mother are kind and patient to him, but they do not encourage the use of a home phone (and to whom he would call - except to fellow practitioners who also hide from idleness in parents homes), and the letters go a long time - he wrote and wait a week for an answer. It’s the end of the 1960s, but sex, drugs, and rock and roll are just as far from respectable "Villages" (as the inhabitants call their district), like the Moon or, say, a festival in Woodstock. To save himself from the exhausting summer boredom, Paul signs up at a local tennis club. Fate is predetermined by fate: one day he will be invited to play in a mixed-pair tournament, and the draw will assign him a partner - 48-year-old Susan Macleod, dress with green trim, tall, married, two adult daughters, a homemaker.

"Most of us have only one story at the ready, writes Barnes at the very beginning of the novel. - Do not misunderstand - I do not claim at all that only one event happens in the life of everyone. There are countless events, you can add as many stories as you like about them. Only one is significant; in the end, only her worth telling." It is such a story that defines the rest of his life, for Paul, his affair with Susan becomes light and carefree at first, then frustrating and painful, at the very end devastating and hopelessly tragic.

The love story of a mature woman and a young man can be told in different ways, and Barnes chooses the most piercing and gentle of them, making the characters actually peers in terms of life experience. For each of the lovers, the other turns out to be the second sexual partner: Paul, shortly before the described events, lost his virginity with a university girlfriend, Susan lived for many years in an unhappy marriage. Paul really saw little in his short century, Susan from his youth, as in a crystal coffin, locked up in the sleepy eventless world of his family and the London suburb. It seems that the age difference is deceptive - they both enter into their relationship equally untrained, touchingly awkward. In fact, the years that have passed are important - although not in the sense, in which it seems at first: the hidden wounds Susan got in her marriage open up and start bleeding, destroying their love with Paul.

"The Only Story" is divided into three parts. The first, the brightest, telling about the happy summer story of the novel by Susan and Paul, was written from a serene first person. Her hero is a boy, jubilant of the fact that an adult beautiful woman paid attention to him, a little afraid of the responsibility connected with it, but still too frivolous and self-confident to seriously worry about it.

The second part, starting from the moment Susan moves to Paul in London and covering the period until their break many years later, is the most painful, and here Barnes turns into a burning, emotionally sharp second person: "You begin to understand that perhaps a free soul as you imagined it, but at the same time a broken free soul." Along with the change of perspective, the hero also changes. The floor from the second part is a young man who has matured prematurely, cradling someone else's shameful mystery, darting between pride ("you carry a heavy load and bear it with dignity") and despair.

The third part - in fact, the whole life of Paul after parting with Susan, and here the fiery hissing third person comes to replace the fiery hissing "you": "He became a man of carefully generous and carefully impulsive." The culmination of Paul's life is over, everything further is a quiet and not without amenity waiting for the final, a time of quiet and lonely living, an epilog that lasted for many years.