A potential highlight of the year came early and didn't disappoint. It arrived Friday, was begun Saturday tea-time and was finished by early Sunday afternoon. There is almost no higher recommendation. The books that were laid aside to make way for it hardly noticed that they had been.Julian Barnes is a 'literary' novelist but, in this book at least, stays on the right side of taking it too far. It is vividly credible, and works like Larkin's device for re-creating emotions in the reader, it regularly achieves powerful moments of recognition and is written in prose of such clarity there is never a need to check back on a sentence which, in some writers, I sometimes need to do.
Barnes not only has a profound grasp of the human condition but, as is documented elsewhere, believes in love. Paul, his student protagonist who has a long relationship with an older woman he meets at the tennis club, has a notebook in which he collects quotes about love (Tennyson's 'better to have loved', for example) but then crosses them out when he finds they don't apply. Barnes compiles a similar list of his own truisms during the meditative passages that become longer and more regular as the book proceeds. A novel is never just a story for him. They are good until one begins to wonder if almost any pronouncement on the subject sounds meaningful to anyone sufficiently wrapped up in the idea.
A number of references, perhaps unconsciously, bring to mind other literature, and prompt comparison. Paul's girlfriend, Susan's, ears are beautiful which might remind Murakami readers of the girl who had ears that could stop traffic but whereas that is all Murakami tells us, Barnes dwells longer on the detail. And when Paul finds solace in work when things become less rapturous, there is Larkin's Toads Revisited, which has a similar 'played-out' acceptance to it as Barnes' downbeat but magnificent and beautifully proven ending. 'Played-out' is a recurring idea, for a generation, for a stage in later life, throughout The Only Story - the title being the idea that although we all might have many stories, we really have only one.
It is rare for Barnes' prose to draw attention to itself and I'm sure that he means it to be unobtrusive and words like 'helices', in the description of the ears, or the 'floatingness' of music seem natural to him and only stand out as particularly erudite to those of us who are less so.
At the end of part one of the three, I was short-listing this as one of the very best novels of recent years alongside such things as Mothering Sunday, The Paying Guests, Sweet Tooth and The Sense of an Ending, all of which are just as English because Barnes here is a bit less French than he sometimes is, French film though The Only Story could certainly be. As part 2 becomes darker that is no reason to regard it as any less but it might stray more than it needs to into the composite fiction-essay that much of Barnes' writing is. As it becomes more of a case study of what happens to Susan, unconditional love eventually finds its limits which is what we are left with all the more powerfully because part 1 had not allowed us to foresee it becoming so.
There is little else to question about an obvious masterpiece. Perhaps it could have been twenty pages shorter, I don't know, but it is hardly prolix. I don't think the earlier Barnes is quite as good, or it's good in different ways but I ordered three more that I haven't read to put on the pile because by now I'm sure he is foremost among the many fine novelists writing in English.
Whether it's possible to be quite so sure about poetry is hard to say. Would that it were, would that it were.