Let's Talk About Love --- Love, Etc - by Julian Barnes (Book Review 25)

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The novel is about three people, two men, Stuart and Oliver, and the woman Gillian. What is their relationship? Gillian, “...if there are two people in the world I understand, they’re Stuart and Oliver. After all, I have been married to both of them.” Aha! The grammatical tense is strange, though. She was married to Stuart for a short time. Then she left him for his friend Oliver with whom she has been married for about ten years and with whom she has two daughters when the story begins. Stuart is back from the USA where he lived, remarried and re-divorced, this time an American woman. He wriggles himself into the family. Is he an altruistic benefactor or does he have selfish motives? How do Gillian and Oliver react to his intrusion? The question arises: how does an author dare write the zillionth novel on the worn-out topic of a triangular relationship and hope to be in any way original and worth reading? He can only be original in the presentation and indeed he’s found a way of telling the story in an hitherto unheard way. He presents a chain of events from the viewpoint of each person involved. The idea as such is not original, but the way Barnes presents his characters’ point of view is. He makes them address the reader directly. I found that quite puzzling at first as I hadn’t asked them anything and they kept tugging at me, forcing me to listen to them, confirming, contradicting, blaming or insulting each other. The result is that we are in the position of a jury. Who’s right? What’s the truth? The people telling their stories give us their subjective truth. They don’t lie, not willingly and not unwillingly, either. So, what is truth? Are we ever able to know the answer or are we by force under an illusion when we think we’ve grasped it because of our necessarily subjective views? Interesting questions. What impressed me as much as this problem is the way Barnes makes his characters talk. Not many authors can give their characters different voices. A weak authors tells us that his characters are different. An excellent authors makes us listen to them and find out for ourselves. Stuart is unimaginative, direct, matter-of-fact, a ‘non-fiction man’. When we read what he has to say, it’s like reading a report. Gillian seems to be sure of herself and the choice she’s made - Oliver over Stuart. She talks to us in a colloquial, conversational way with a lot of question tags like ‘isn’t it?’, ‘don’t you?’, ’hasn’t he?’. Yet this urge to reassure herself of our sympathy is a sign that she’s really not as self-confident as she wants to see herself. And then Oliver! At times I suspected Barnes to have invented the whole story only to be able to show off his immense knowledge of the English vocabulary, of quotations from all European literatures, proverbs, sayings, aphorisms. I’d like to meet the English reader capable of understanding each, and I mean each, word Oliver uses. I doubt that there is one. He’s a grave case of verbal diarrhoea, a first-rate blabbermouth. What does he cover up with all the words? Recommended! ----- If you're interested in my other book reviews, click on the green line at the top of the site (Malus Book Reviews) ----- Photo from the net.