The short (273 pp.) novel is the life story of Paul Roberts, who we first meet as a 19-year-old Sussex University undergraduate returning to his parent's house in the leafy southern suburbs of London (Sutton, in Surrey, is suggested as a model.) The time is the early sixties, and there are a few references to current events. Paul joins the tennis club, which is one of the few opportunities such places offer for socializing. In random-draw mixed doubles, he is thrown together with Susan MacLeod, a 48-year-old married woman with two daughters older than Paul. Improbably, Paul and Susan become lovers and she eventually leaves her family to set up a house with Paul in South London. Having nothing to do but a little housekeeping, Susan soon descends into alcoholism and dementia. Paul departs and embarks on foreign travels, picking up jobs and women at random.
Would you rather love the more, and suffer the more; or love the less, and suffer the less? That is, I think, finally, the only real question."
This sentence, which introduced this most recent book of Julian Barnes to his potential readers, was pretty much my Achilles heel from Page 1. I don’t quite understand how you can adjust the levels of love, like making marks on a burette and letting the content drip as per your desire of color and consistency of the final emotion. Quantifying love is beyond my comprehension.
And yet, there is a certain granular tenderness in this story of a young man and his (almost) thirty-year senior lover that prevents this love story from becoming a chore.
Seen in the rearview mirror during his twilight years, Paul reminisces the first time his 19-years old self fell for the 48-years old married Susan at a Tennis Court when the two were brought, fortuitously, together to team up for a mixed doubles match, and that his feelings were near immediately reciprocated. Ignited by this act that was both adventurous and liberating, Paul and Susan built walls around them, barricading their respective families with a dangerous, and often confounding, indifference and pushing this affair out of their current state, both literally and geographically. But at their new abode, which stripped them of their familial clutches, love gets suddenly exposed to the calamities of habituation, expectations, and aging. As a result, a whole new world sprouts between the two – one where they commence playing from different sides.
Barnes’ signature prodding into the delicate gossamer of human dilemmas and questionable foibles as much on display here although the narrative veered to the unpleasant edge of excess a good many times. Of the three sections the novel is divided into, the first was a watertight bag that didn’t allow for any of my emotions to blossom. The characters appeared like a bunch left unanchored on a theatre stage, waiting for the director to give them a cue. But beyond those 80 odd pages, Barnes plays his magic trick, and all of a sudden, the palette of love bursts open and renders an immersive experience. The turning points when love turns into duty, the duty into a burden, the burden into a gash, and the gash into a permanent scar, are the crevices where Barnes resonated the most with me.
”Love was by its very nature disruptive, cataclysmic; and if it was not, then it was not love.”
4) Critique of Crosswords
Crosswords is a kind of symbol that is very significantly used by Julian Barnes. there are two people are playing crosswords in the novel, one is Mr. Gordon Macleod and another is Joan. It is said that Crossword puzzles have several benefits: They can strengthen social bonds. Completing a crossword puzzle on your own is impressive, but you should never feel bad if you need to ask for help. They improve your vocabulary. They increase your knowledge base. They can relieve stress. They boost your mood. It was Paul Roberts who describe hidden aspects of these crosswords. It’s significance the leisure of British people. By playing this game people might think that they are solving the puzzles with the difficulties in life.
5) Paul - the unreliable narrator
“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.
Paul is a quintessentially alienated character. With no interest in either politics or religion and no particular ambition, he takes life as it comes. As he narrates his life in this book, he freely admits that memory is unreliable and he may not be telling us the truth.
6) Susan - madwoman in the attic
while we’re about it, I may as well say that I once promised her there would always be room in my life for her, even if it was just an attic.’
‘Paul, I don’t want an attic in my life.’ And then she said it. ‘Especially not with a madwoman in it.’
Ultimately this is a beautifully written and, at times, moving novel. So why only three stars. Well this is just Barnes’ 4th novel since 2000. And whereas the other 3, Arthur and George (2005), The Sense of an Ending (2011) and The Noise of Time (2016) were all distinctive, this feels like too much of a re-working of past territory, particularly The Sense of an Ending, and without the Mcewanesque twist that elevated the latter to a worthy Booker winner (even if chosen by a rather unworthy Booker jury).
7) Whom do you think is responsible for the tragedy in the story? Explain with reasons.
Anything else on which you would like to ponder upon?
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? and Paul feels guilty that he wants to escape from all the things.
Thanks😊
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