The three characters from Talking It Over sparkle again in Julian Barnes's new novel, Love Etc

Tim Adams
Sunday July 23, 2000
The Observer

Love Etc
Julian Barnes
Buy it at BOL

When, a decade ago, Julian Barnes wrote Talking It Over, in which a love triangle of self-absorbed characters opened their hearts directly to the reader and told their versions of the fidelities and infidelities that bound them, it seemed like a novel kind of novel. It was also, with hindsight, a prophetic one. In the 10 years since, the Talking It Over-style confessional has become something like our official national rhetoric.

In that time, often by default, we have become used to measuring our own experiences against the savvy solipsisms of wronged, ditched, angry and media-literate thirtysomethings. No north London marriage break-up these days, it seems, comes without a newspaper column, the promise of a hefty publisher's advance and the sniff of a film deal.

Daytime television is entirely based on the notion that an intimate problem shared (with a couple of million people) is, well, an intimate problem shared. Magazines have grown up to peddle true-life stories of the not-so-rich and barely famous, and our popular culture has been in thrall to imports - Sex and the City, Ally McBeal - that offer first-person girls-talk about designer relationships.

The Nineties' push towards recycling was nowhere as successful as with the emotional lives of the confessional classes, which are now routinely sifted and lucratively repackaged for general consumption.

For Love, Etc, Barnes has returned to the characters he introduced in Talking It Over: Oliver, 'the marriage-breaker, wild dog, blood-sucker, snake in the grass, parasite, predator, vulture dingo'; Stuart, the cuckoldee, who described his one-time best friend Oliver as all of the above; and Gillian, now wife to the former, once wife to the latter. But what then seemed a gentle satire on the bed-hopping betrayals of a post-promiscuous generation now looks like a comment on an entire kiss 'n' tell industry. We have always, I suppose, lived by what Oliver here calls 'the voice-over in your own head, the one that comments on your life as you live it', but never before has this voice-over been quite so familiar with the nuance of voice-overs.

Barnes plays these fashionable conventions for all they are worth. His book is by turns a precise, hilarious parody of the mores of self-serving confession, and a very stringent and stylish inquiry into the nature of truth and the compensations offered by love. His characters have moved on, changed, got a little older and a little more bitter (but then so, perhaps, have his readers: 'You probably think you're much the same as you were back then,' announces Oliver, cruelly, on page one. 'Believe me, you aren't.')

All three protagonists are still defence counsels for their own versions of the events that forced them together and apart, slick-talking, misty-eyed lifestyle attorneys appealing to our emotions and plea-bargaining for sympathy and special dispensations: 'Isn't there a statute of limitations for wife-stealing?' Oliver demands at one point, asking Stuart, Gillian - but more important we the jury - to deal with him a little more leniently.

Barnes is the sharpest and most humane observer of the particular frailties of the average middle-class Englishman at the beginning of the twenty-first century. He is also the consummate deconstructor of the lies we all tell ourselves about romance. He attends sharp-eyed to the syntactical shifts wrought by habit: Gillian frets, for example, that familiarity has caused her to drop the 'I' from 'I love you' when she says it to Oliver each day: is the love it describes also losing its subject? Barnes has us quietly wonder throughout in this way - and the 10-year time-lag heightens this sense of temporal decline - whether love is really not time's fool.

This is the question that lies somewhere near the heart of all of Barnes's best work (in books that have always carried the same solitary dedication to his wife Pat Kavanagh), and in some ways Love, Etc is a cynical riposte to the magical half chapter defence of love that underwrote A History of the World in 10 Chapters.

Stuart, who has had his love replaced by betrayal and revenge, and who now carries in his wallet a photograph of his ex-wife, her face bleeding having been hit by Oliver, turns on the reader at one point with a sneer: 'You look surprised. Think about it. Examine your own life. Love leads to happiness? Come off it.'

In some ways, this is the lightest of novels, a little social comedy that you can read in a long afternoon. But within it, and partly because of the format which leaves the reader without authorial compass and unsure where truths lie, there is a much darker book. There was always something claustrophobic about the range of options open to Gillian and Stuart and Oliver, but now their choices seem to have closed in on them still further.

Stuart, who has become wealthy in America, and remarried and redivorced, is protected from the world by his lack of imagination (he says things like: 'I'm suspicious of people comparing things with other things'); Oliver, meanwhile, has always attempted to protect himself from the world with his wild and whirling words and his faith in: 'Love, etc. That has always been my formula, my theory, my wisdom. I knew it at once, as an infant knows its mother's smile.'

This novel deals with the breakdown of Oliver's faith, the realisation that 'The world, being constructed as it is, will not allow [for fantasy]. Realism is our given, our only mode, triste truth as it might be to some.' Oliver is a memorable creation here, Barnes's wannabe Thersites. His list of likes includes 'that moment when you change gear and your passenger's beloved head does not even stir on its spinal column, risotto nero, the third act trio from Rosenkavalier...' but his list of dislikes is much, much longer.

He is the romantic child starved of affection - his mother died when he was a boy, his father took it out on him and his 'wife disgraced him by crying at his funeral'. His version of the world is a seductive one and it can take us almost anywhere with all the vitality of Barnes's most beguiling intelligence.

But despite the intellectual bravado of this voice, there is no triumph here for 'Oliver-speak'; Oliver earns his living pushing junk mail through letter boxes while writing screenplays in his head that will never get written. Gillian, touchingly, marks up the newspaper for him every morning to try to interest him in the world beyond his head: 'But news delights me not, nor features neither.'

All he resolves eventually is that: 'Stuart bores me. Gillian bores me. I bore me.' His sad, comical, little life hinges on the impossibility of one person ever knowing another person's reality. That, it also seems, is the message of Barnes's sparkling little novel, which ends with the question it dramatises, the question we are all stuck with: 'What do you think?'

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