Love, etc [Englisch] [Taschenbuch]

This is now the fourth novel I've read from Julian Barnes, shortly after I had decided that three was enough. There is no doubt about it, Barnes is quite exceptionally gifted, as a novelist, as a writer and as a virtuoso with the English language. What tends to get up my nose is the self-admiring sense that I get from him. He is a bit of a smartyboots not to say a cleverclogs, and there is always a distinct feeling of exhibitionism about his manner.

This book is a sequel to his Talking It Over. The main characters are the same, and the formula is the same. The story is entirely told by the characters in their own personae. In particular the ineffectual Oliver is still at it as before, chattering his gilded futile chatter, and I can't escape the impression that Mr Barnes was unable to resist the temptation to show us again just how adept he is in capturing the idiom. As well as an acute ear, Barnes has an acute and observant eye for how people behave and how they think and feel, and I find the characterisation extremely convincing, both within this story just taken by itself and in how the actors have changed and developed over the ten years that have intervened since Talking It Over. The blurb on the back cover describes Love, etc as `darker and deeper than its predecessor', but I don't think I really agree. Certainly some of the motivations and the some of the incidents in Love, Etc are not very pretty or nice, but the same could have been said about Talking It Over, and the author's preening self-preoccupation actually does a great deal to lighten any darkness in the story here. It is very readable and involving, I found, and if anything even better than the story that provides its starting-off point. In particular the ending, with Stuart and Gillian each wondering whether the other `loves' them has a great ring of truth about it for me. What exactly might it be, this `loving', and how exactly would they tell? The heir to the British throne famously distressed his young bride many years ago by talking in public about `falling in love, whatever that is'. That may have been crass, it may have been inept, but surely it made sense.

To get the best out of Love, Etc I'd say that you really need to have read Talking It Over first. That will introduce the characters to you and explain in proper depth what happened ten years and more earlier and where they are all coming from in this new episode. Neither book is long, and this particular edition makes this book look bigger than it is with its large print. What fills me with mixed feelings is the ending here, with some distinctly important and dangerous issues left unresolved, and the main characters in different ways in peril of the ruination of their lives. It is all crying out for a further sequel, and I'm not sure how I look forward to the prospect of that, although foreboding is definitely a strong element in what I feel. I hope he doesn't do it, because something tells me strongly that if he does it will be a sequel too far. However if he does turn out such a sequel I'm pretty sure that I for one will be reading it.

In this inventive and unconventional narrative, Barnes turns the old fiction-writing maxim, "Don't tell about something, recreate it," on its head, choosing not to recreate anything at all. Instead, his three main characters address the reader in soliloquies, each telling his version of events that have happened in the past and leaving it up to the reader to decide what really happened.

Stuart, stodgy and predictable, was briefly married to Gillian before dashing Oliver stole her away. Ten years have passed, Stuart has remarried, divorced, become financially successful in the U.S., and returned to England. Oliver and Gillian are still married, the parents of two daughters. As their lives once again intertwine, many of the old tensions revive, along with some new tensions, the result of the characters' changes in ten years.

Barnes's characters are vivid, and their speeches to the audience are both dramatic and real. One can easily see how the various characters would interpret events differently, and that aspect of the book is fun to read. There are numerous disadvantages to Barnes's approach, however. The characters are independent of the reader, isolated not only from the reader but from each other, and they feel like actors on a stage who have not invited anyone in to share their lives. The reader's role becomes that of an observer or a judge, deciding not only what happened but what will happen in the future. Readers looking for an unusual narrative will find this book fascinating and carefully constructed, though perhaps a bit slow. Mary Whipple