Review | Julian Barnes tackles sex, relation­­ships and ageing in tender age-gap love story

The Only Story
by Julian Barnes
Jonathan Cape

Although he has not won the fame of contemporary Martin Amis, Julian Barnes is in remarkable fettle for a novelist 40 years into his writing career, having won the Man Booker Prize in 2011 for The Sense of an Ending, and now publishing his 15th book since the turn of the millennium.

The Only Story is set in “the Village”, the “Metro­land” of the commuter suburbs surrounding London that Barnes has made his own since his 1980 debut, but there’s ­no coasting on former glories. The story pulses with wit, empathy and wisdom, with insights into sex, relation­­ships, and the vagaries of ageing. It is funny but sad, tender but disillusioned.

The story is that of 19-year-old student Paul, who starts a relationship with a middle-aged neighbour, Susan. Married and the mother of two daughters (also students), Susan’s husband, Gordon, pays little attention to her, preferring his “flagons and gallons”. Having accused his wife of frigidity, he has long since retreated to the spare bedroom.

Barnes’ setting is precisely, ironically, tenderly and satirically evoked. It’s 1960: still, just, the time of Young Conservatives, tennis clubs, a neighbourly sherry and the Times crossword. Gordon tolerates the affair, the daughters disapprove, while the tennis club where Paul and Susan met rescinds their memberships.

This doesn’t become the story of a boy instructed in love by an older woman (after 20 years of conjugal indifference, Susan is as sexually inexperienced as Paul); The Only Story is far more nuanced than that. Susan and Paul move to London so he can study law. There he congratulates himself on his daring, his radicalism, his rejection of bourgeois staidness, as Susan descends into alcoholism.