And still never got round to reading him.
This month's book group book forced me to take the leap.
The reviews of this book tell us that it's devastating, profoundly beautiful sad and powerful.
Personally, I think it's the single most middle-class and safe book I've ever read.
The prose is good. I'll give Mr Barnes that much. He can write. This book was never less than readable. There were moments of droll humour which did make me laugh.
But the story is almost non-existent. Nineteen year old boy falls for a 48 year old woman at the tennis club (how very middle class). They start an affair and yadah yadah yadah.
It actually starts off pretty well. Paul is an engaging narrator to begin with, telling us the story of his youth from the point of view of his much older self, with some nice observations about memory. The problems kick in in part two of the book. Part two also begins well. Part one is entirely the happy nature of his relationship with Susan. Part two takes us back and looks more deeply, revealing the less pleasant aspects of their early life together.
At some point, the narrative switches from a first person past tense narration to a second person present tense narrative voice. You watch as she does this, you watch as she does that... etc. It flicks back and forth randomly. In this section, Paul switches from an engaging young man to a dithering and quite annoying character, you wish he'd grow up and make a decision for himself.
By part three the book has completely lost it for me. Part three starts talking about Paul in the third person. At first I thought that maybe we were getting Susan's side of the story and my interest peaked, but it quickly became obvious that this was either some unknown person or Paul talking about himself in the third person. Is this meant to demonstrate his distancing from his feelings because of the rather predictable events of part two? I don't know.
Part three follows him into senior adulthood and his life after Susan. It's extremely random and is more full of allegedly wise observations on life and love than any actual story. Susan's eventual fate is an illness that was dealt with more movingly in one of the segments of Joe Hill's Strange Weather.
He's done a good job in part two of robbing all sympathy from the reader for both central characters, so the final part of the books fails entirely to engage the emotions. I'm not sure he was aiming for that when he wrote it.
It's all well written but ultimately it's very ordinary middle class people doing very ordinary middle class things and it all seems rather pointless.
The title is quite prophetic, as it's probably the only story I'll ever read by Julian Barnes.
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