Novels' Analytical Summaries: 'The Only Story' by Julian Barnes

Julian Barnes
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via Wikimedia Commons

SHORT SUMMARY

Julian Barnes's novel, 'The Only Story,' is a deeply personal and contemplative account of a first love, narrated by Paul, a man in his sixties who is reflecting on a formative relationship from his youth.

The novel is set in the suburban landscape of 1960s England, an era of rigid social conventions, where a naive and idealistic 19-year-old Paul meets Susan, a woman in her late forties. Their encounter at a local tennis club sparks a connection that defies the norms of their time and community. Susan, a married mother of two, is initially presented as a somewhat reserved and elegant figure, but Paul quickly discovers a more complex and vulnerable side to her.

Their relationship begins in a clandestine and exhilarating manner. Paul's narrative vividly captures the thrill of their secret meetings, the coded conversations, and the emotional high of their developing intimacy. For Paul, this is a defining moment, an all-consuming passion that he believes is "the only story" worth telling. He sees Susan not just as a lover, but as a gateway to the adult world, a teacher who introduces him to art, literature, and the complexities of human emotion.

For Susan, Paul represents a second chance at life and happiness, an escape from the suffocating routine of her marriage and the responsibilities that have long defined her. They are two people from different worlds, united by a shared need for connection and a fleeting moment of rebellion.

The affair, however, cannot be sustained in secrecy. The couple eventually decides to move to London, hoping that a new environment will allow their love to flourish openly. This significant step marks a crucial turning point in the novel. The initial euphoria of their new life together begins to fade, replaced by the mundane and often painful realities of their situation.

The financial and social pressures weigh heavily on them. Paul, having left his university studies, must find work, and the age gap that once seemed irrelevant in the thrill of their affair now becomes a source of tension and insecurity. It is in London that Susan's inner turmoil becomes increasingly apparent. She begins to drink heavily, her charm and wit giving way to a weary sadness and a dependency that puts a strain on their bond.

As the years pass, the narrative shifts from a tale of passionate love to a somber chronicle of decline and disillusionment. Paul matures, but the process is painful. He goes from being Susan’s lover to her primary caregiver, witnessing her slow descent into alcoholism. The romance he once idealized is replaced by a difficult reality, forcing him to confront the limitations of their love and the destructive power of obsession.

The story is a harsh lesson for Paul, who realizes that love is not a simple, single narrative but a messy and multifaceted journey. The novel concludes with Paul as an old man, reflecting on his memories of Susan, now tinged with nostalgia, regret, and a quiet sense of loss. He accepts that his memory is just one version of what happened, a subjective retelling of a story that shaped his entire life. The novel leaves the reader to ponder whether any love story is truly "the only story" or merely one of many chapters that define who we become.

ANALYTICAL SUMMARY

Part One: The beginnings (first-person; the rush of “we”)

The tennis club draw
Home from university for the summer (early 1960s), Paul is nudged by his mother into joining the village tennis club. A random mixed-doubles draw partners him with Susan Macleod, 48, quick with a quip and better at tennis than the lot of them. Their on-court chemistry becomes playful conspiracy against the club’s smug norms. Paul falls, hard.
After-match rituals: jokes, lifts, and a new language
Paul and Susan begin the ritual of post-tennis drinks and drives—code, banter, and private jokes forming their idiolect. She nicknames her husband “Elephant Pants”; Paul notices a mixture of resilience and vulnerability in her. The suburban setting—stifling and watchful—makes every small rebellion feel electric.
First confession, first kiss
They admit the attraction. Susan is frank about being married with two nearly grown daughters; Paul is nineteen and—crucially—romantically absolutist. The first kiss is both an awakening and a pledge: they will defy propriety to claim a love they believe is truer than any rule.
The private canopy
Paul narrates their secret meetings with the intoxicating certainty of first love. In his words, “Most of us have only one story to tell”—and this is it. (Quote ≤90 chars.) Their affair soon becomes common knowledge among a circle that clucks, gossips, and judges.
The violence beneath the surface
Gordon’s abusiveness—physical and emotional—becomes undeniable. Susan’s missing teeth and practiced lightness tell their own tale. Paul’s chivalric instinct hardens into resolve: he will “save” her, love as rescue. (The novel steadily complicates that premise.)
Running away to run a household
Susan leaves Gordon. She and Paul set up together in south London. The love-nest quickly encounters real life: money, errands, social frost, and, in time, a problem Paul hasn’t understood yet.

Part Two: Unraveling (second person; you watch yourself)

You discover the bottle
The point of view loosens into second person—“you” discover the scale of Susan’s drinking. At first it’s a nightcap; then it’s the day’s structure. The bright, conspiratorial Susan dims, then flickers. You (Paul) move from lover to caretaker, hiding empties, rationing gin, bargaining with mornings.
Caretaking as vocation—and trap
Paul cycles through strategies: gentle limits, strict rules, threats, supervision, hopeful resets. He believes his love can cure her; she resents the policing. Humiliation thickens the air of the flat. The tenderness persists, but now braided with fear, resentment, and exhaustion.
The social and family fallout
Susan’s daughters—Martha and Clara—keep their distance; neighbors and old club acquaintances reduce the pair to a morality tale. Paul’s own parents alternate between embarrassment and moral panic. He digs in further, interpreting isolation as proof of fidelity. Wikipedia
Joan’s grim wisdom
Susan’s friend Joan appears, a tragic chorus figure measuring life by the price of gin; she sees through both Susan’s denial and Paul’s savior complex. Her presence underlines how addiction compresses horizons until only the next bottle fits.
Escalation and crisis
Relapses blur into each other. There are hospitalizations, promises, and the hollow ring of fresh starts. Paul’s notebook of quotations about love grows, equal parts philosophy and self-hypnosis. He clings to the premise that “pain is an inevitable concomitant of love,” even as the pain becomes the only constant.
Second-person estrangement
Barnes’s shift to “you” externalizes Paul’s life: he watches himself performing a role he can’t stop playing. The romance that began as a liberation becomes a loop he narrates from outside his own body.

Part Three: The long aftermath (third person; the distance of “he”)

He leaves, or he fades
Perspective cools into third person. Paul—“he”—finally steps back. Whether you call it leaving or surrendering, he relocates, travels, takes jobs, gathers smaller relationships (including with Anna). None dislodges the gravitational field of Susan.
The philosophy of damage
He continues compiling aphorisms and reading on love, trying to convert experience into knowledge. He wonders whether he’d have been happier if he’d loved less, suffered less—if emotional parsimony might be a saner ethic after all. (Short quote ok: “love the less, and suffer the less”.)
Susan’s decline
Alcoholism yields cognitive decline; she is eventually sectioned and sedated in a psychiatric hospital. The former brightness returns only as a flicker. Paul visits. The novel refuses melodrama: there is no grand reconciliation, only the truth of irreversible damage and the quiet dignity of being there.
The last look; the first person returns
In the closing pages, the “I” briefly returns as Paul offers a valediction that is neither absolution nor condemnation. The book’s title lands: this was—and remains—his only story.

Character map & dynamics

Paul Roberts: Begins as a romantic absolutist; believes love justifies transgression and can conquer circumstance. The narrative’s shrinking pronouns (I → you → he) chart his disillusionment and self-estrangement. His later life is a long argument with his younger self: Was the suffering a price worth paying?
Susan Macleod: Quick, witty, and, at first, defiantly alive—then progressively consumed by addiction. Barnes refuses to reduce her to a cautionary emblem; her charm, courage, and pain coexist. Her drinking is not a plot device but an existential undertow the book treats with unsentimental clarity.
Gordon Macleod (husband): The novel’s crudest exponent of social violence. His abuse (physical and emotional) helps explain Susan’s desperation and the appeal of Paul’s idealism, without excusing anything.
Joan: A bleak mirror for Susan’s trajectory; she converts survival into a shopping skill (finding the cheapest gin). She’s both comic and desolate, a witness to what dependency does to choice.
Eric & Anna: Eric offers friendship’s counterpoint; Anna represents Paul’s attempt to re-enter ordinary life. Neither can displace the central narrative in his head—the story.

Major themes (with brief illustrative quotes)

All quotations are brief (≤90 characters) to remain within fair-use limits.

Love vs. pain
The book opens by posing the wager of love: “love the more, and suffer the more” vs. “love the less, and suffer the less”. The rest of the novel is evidence for both sides. Paul’s eventual view shades toward austerity: he suspects pain is love’s tax, not its proof.
Memory’s unreliability
Paul admits that recollection edits and invents. The narrative’s shifting person (I/you/he) formalizes that slipperiness. What we get is not an objective record but a self-portrait in moving mirrors—how a man chooses to remember the feeling of himself.
Transgression vs. conformity
The tennis club and its suburb are both comic stage and moral tribunal. First love becomes a social scandal not only because of age and marital status but because it exposes anxieties about female desire and respectability in mid-century England.
Addiction as eros’s undoing
Barnes avoids sensationalism: the scenes of drinking are banal, repetitive, and thus realistically demoralizing. Addiction deromanticizes everything; even devotion curdles into management. The tragedy is slow, procedural.
Story as self-definition
“Most of us have only one story to tell.” Paul’s identity coheres around this one; he keeps a notebook of love-sayings as if philosophy could stabilize feeling. The book asks whether telling the story is healing—or another way of staying stuck.
Time, person, and moral perspective
Part One’s first person is intoxicated and intimate; Part Two’s second person is chastening and self-alienating; Part Three’s third person is elegiac and skeptical. The grammar is the morality: as certainty drains away, so does the claim to “I.”

Motifs & symbols

Tennis & the club: Organized pastime as mask for organized hypocrisy. Mixed doubles is the cute origin of a love that won’t stay containable.
Keys, cars, lifts: Mobility and secrecy; the freedom to cross boundaries—until alcohol redraws the map and freedom narrows to errands.
Bottles & shopping: Domesticity weaponized by addiction; routines of care that become rituals of defeat (counting, hiding, replacing).
The notebook of love sayings: Paul’s attempt to intellectualize what hurts. Turning feeling into maxims can clarify—but it can also anesthetize.

Style and narrative craft

Barnes’s prose is stripped, aphoristic, and deceptively gentle; it lures the reader into a novel that is, at its core, about the ethics of remembering. The absence of conventional chapters produces a fluid, essayistic rhythm—closer to a confession or case study than to a melodrama. The pronoun drift (I→you→he→I) is the masterstroke: it dramatizes how passion becomes experience, and experience becomes story.

Ending explained (and why it hurts)

By the time Paul says his final goodbye to Susan—now sedated, sectioned, and far from the witty woman on Court 3—he understands that love can be both formative and destructive. There is no redemptive coda; the point is not whether their love was “worth it” in a cosmic sense, but that it made him. He cannot unknow the version of himself that loved Susan, nor can he live inside that version forever. The last-minute return to first person restores agency just long enough for Paul to acknowledge the truth without ornament. It’s not catharsis; it’s clarity.

Frequently asked questions

Is The Only Story based on a true story? No explicit claim; it’s fiction, though Barnes often mines memory and aging.
Why the age-gap? The novel stresses transgression as catalyst. The scandal exposes norms; the relationship’s dynamics expose Paul to adult reality.
What “happens” plot-wise? Boy meets older, married woman; they flee respectability; addiction and time dismantle the romance; he lives in its wake.
What’s with the second person? It acts like a conscience—Paul observing himself, unable to fully own or disown choices.

Pull-quotes (brief, fair-use length)

“Most of us have only one story to tell.”
“love the more, and suffer the more”
“love the less, and suffer the less”
“It is the only story.”

(Each under 90 characters.)

Study prompts

Rescue vs. respect: Where does Paul’s care end and control begin?
What is being remembered? Events, or the feeling of being a certain person?
Is love an education? If so, what did Paul learn, and what did it cost others?
Pronoun ethics: How does “you” change our judgment of Paul?
Addiction and agency: Does the novel grant Susan enough interiority?

Why the novel still resonates

The love story is intense, but the book’s lasting power lies in its moral intelligence. Instead of valorizing transgression or scolding it, Barnes shows how romance collides with the ordinary—shopping lists, medical visits, leases, gossip, and the price of gin—and how ordinary things turn epic under stress. The result is a slender novel with the weight of a life, one that many readers recognize even if the precise circumstances are not theirs.

Final takeaway

The Only Story is not a parable about the virtue or vice of age-gap love; it’s a meditation on how one love, however it ends, can become the lens through which a person understands everything else. Paul’s great question—how much to love, and thus how much to suffer—never receives a universal answer. What he learns, finally, is that some prices are paid in installments over a lifetime, and that telling the story is part of how we carry the debt.