The EconomistFebruary 3rd 2018 Books and arts 731“A
LL happy families are alike,” Tolstoy
famously wrote; “each unhappy
family is unhappy in its own way.” The
opening lines of “Anna Karenina” are so
famous, in fact, that their assumptions are
broadly accepted. Write with conviction,
and some people will believe anything.
Julian Barnes plays on that suggestibility in
his new novel. “Most of us have only one
story to tell,” his narrator, Paul, says on the
openingpage, foistinganother bold pre-
mise on the reader. “I don’t mean that only
one thing happens to us in our lives: there
are countlessevents, which we turn into
countless stories. But there’s only one that
matters, only one finally worth telling.”
Paul’s story is that of his love affair with
Susan. He is 19 when they meet and a stu-
dent at Sussex University; she is a married
woman, nearly 30 years his senior, the
mother of two grown daughters, stuck in a
loveless marriage. “The time: more than fif-
ty years ago. The place: about fifteen miles
south of London. The milieu: stockbroker
belt, as they called it—not that I ever met a
stockbroker in all my years there.” (Mr
Barnes’s very first novel, “Metroland”,
published in 1980, had a similar setting.)
One day at the local tennis club Paul
finds himself in a mixed-doubles pair with
Susan and offers her a lift home. Their rela-tionship will consume his life, and is the
subject ofthis deceptively simple book.
Mr Barnes is a master ofthe novel that
unfolds cleanly before the reader and yet
interrogates itself as it is told. His previous
book, “The Noise of Time”, was a fictional-
ised biography of Dmitri Shostakovich. In
it the Soviet composer recognises that it is
“impossible to tell the truth here and live”.
“I’m not trying to spin you a story,” Paul in-
sists in “The Only Story”. “I’m trying to tell
you the truth.” But over and again, he says
that he can’t remember, or that he can’t be
bothered to tell us, or remarks that he is
simply incurious about some aspect of his
life or the lives of those around him. He
doesn’t even remember when he and Su-
san first kissed.
And so, as the novel shifts between the
first, second and third person—Paul, look-
ing back on his life, is sometimes “I”, some-
times “you”, sometimes “he”—this “only
story” slips away like sand between the
fingers, as does the object of Paul’s desire.
Susan is a curiously elusive presence,
evoked in a series of repeated phrases and
images. The narrative voice remains reso-
lutely focused on itself: “When I am with
Susan, I’m not thinking what it’s like to
love her; I’m justbeing with her. And may-
be that ‘being with her’ is impossible to put
into any other words.”
Some might view this as an imaginative
failure on the novelist’s part, particularly in
the era of #MeToo. But, as the tale spools
out, the effect is a vivid and awful dramati-
sation of the narcissism of obsessive love.
Paul claims a solemn “duty” to remember
Susan as she was when they first met—a
quick-witted, charming woman in a tennis
dress—but finally this lover’s allegiance is
to himself, and himself alone. 7New fictionFallen in love
The Only Story. By Julian Barnes. Jonathan
Cape; 224 pages; £16.99. To be published in
America by Knopf in April; $25.95R
EVOLUTIONS are inherently intellectu-
al. Often powered by ideologies, they
are also, at bottom, imaginative leaps: de-
mands for a different life, premised, says
Marci Shore, on a faith that “at any mo-
ment everything could change”. “The Uk-
rainian Night” is her account of the pro-de-
mocracy uprising in Ukraine in 2014 and its
aftermath, turmoil that was at once viscer-
al and peculiarly cerebral, involving va-
rious languages, religions, ethnicities, ver-
sions of history and visions of the future.
Ms Shore, a historian at Yale University,
briskly describes Ukraine’s blood-soaked
past and the relevant modern events: the
failure of the Orange revolution of 2004;
the gangsterish presidency of Viktor Yanu-
kovych; the terror he unleashed against
protesters and his flight to Russia; the an-
nexation of Crimea and the war Vladimir
Putin hallucinated into reality in the Don-
bas. But this is not conventional history or
reportage. Ms Shore was not on the Mai-
dan, Kiev’s Independence Square and the
epicentre of the revolution, and does not
visit the front. Instead, in short, meditative
chapters that mimicher subjects’ fractured
experiences, she captures the feelings of
people drawn into the convulsions.
One of them, Slava Vakarchuk, is the
lead singer of Okean Elzy, a pop group, and
famous in Ukraine; others are lesser-
known students and teachers. They and
she habitually refer to philosophers and
authors, above all Russian writers such as
Akhmatova, Dostoyevsky and Gogol, the
shared intellectual inheritance of Russians
and Ukrainians (the book’s title comes
from a poem by Mayakovsky). These inter-
views sketch the psychological stages of
revolution. They evoke an aura of solidar-
ity in which “the borders that normally ex-
isted between people dissolved”, individ-
uality seeming at once fulfilled and
subsumed by the crowd. They describe an
imperative, now-or-never moment of
choice, and the way, on the Maidan, time
seemed to collapse.
Finally comes a numb willingness to
die—and, in some cases, to kill. One young
man comes to understand that “the mo-
ment he had desired [the deaths of his ene-
mies] was in some sense the moment of
his own death as well.” After one near-fatal
confrontation, he and his friends find
themselves in a café. “Since they were still
alive,” Ms Shore says, “they ordered tea,” a
line that might have come from Chekhov,Turmoil in UkraineDark mirror
The Ukrainian Night: An Intimate History
of Revolution. By Marci Shore.Yale
University Press; 320 pages; $26 and £25