The Only Story by Julian Barnes is a tragic love story of a 19-year-old Paul, son of a policing mother and a milder father less given to judgment and, 48-year-old Mrs Susan Macleod, who is is married with two daughters both older than Paul.
The plot is almost similar to Mario Vargas Llosa's Aunt Julia And The Scriptwriter. But unlike Aunt Julia, this one is bleak as it tries to delve into Susan's sufferings.
The story is recalled from memory by Paul in his old age well following the death of Susan after being treated in a psychiatric institution for depression and related problems.
Paul-- Casey for Susan since she says he 'is a case' --and Susan meet in a tennis court, fall in love and move on to live together. Susan's husband Macleod is a 'Short, fat guy' who while playing golf 'hits the ball as if he hates it,' and is given to a querulous temperament.
The first time Paul goes to Macleod house, is as Susan advises him, through the garden in the back way.
In passing we're informed that Susan ('She laughs at life, this is part of her essence') was a victim of sexual and domestic abuse. When she (her mother dies of cancer when she was 10) used to go and stay with Uncle Humph and Aunt Florence) one night in a drunken mood Humph rams his tongue into her mouth and thrashes it around like a live fish. 'I wish I'd bitten it off,' she says. Every summer he did it till she was about sixteen. 'Oh, it wasn't as bad as for some, I know, but maybe that's what made me frigid.'
When her husband smashes Susan's face into the closed door Paul muses: "One thing I never swerved from was the certainty that Gordon Macleod's behaviour was a crime of absolute liability. And his responsibility was also absolute.
A man hits a woman; a husband hits a wife; a drunkard hits a sober spouse. There was no defence, and no possible mitigation. The fact that it would never come to court, the middle-class England had a thousand ways of avoiding the truth, that respectability was no more shed in public than clothes, the fact that Susan would never accuse him to any authority, not even a dentist -all this had no relevance to me, except sociologically. The man was as guilty as hell, and I would hate him until the end of his days. This much I knew."
He and Susan talk about everything: the state of the world (not good), the state of her marriage (not good), the general character and moral standards of the Village (not good) and even Death (not good).
He takes her to a consultant psychiatrist at a local hospital after she staggers beneath the weight of extreme, unbearable and incompatible emotions. She starts taking alcohol. Her health deteriorates that finally Paul has to hand back Susan to her daughter Martha.
As the narrator recalls, "Handing back Susan had been an act of self-protection on his part. There was no doubt about that; and no doubt in his mind that he had to do it. But beyond this, was it an act of courage, or of cowardice?."
Joan, surviving sister of Gerald, "who donkey's years previously had been sweet on Susan, but then has died suddenly from leukaemia" is an interesting character.
The Only Story is a meditation on love and the tragedy told sans sentiments ("It was as if he viewed, and lived, his life in the third person. Which allowed him to assess it more accurately, he believed") It is not however the best of Barnes' works for it lacks the intensity and magic of say, A History of the World in 10 1/2 Chapters.
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