FFWD Weekly
Copyright © 2000. All Rights Reserved

Books by Lachlan Mackintosh Love, etc by Julian Barnes Random House Canada, 250 pp. In the "most unlikely literary sequel category," Julian Barnes has weighed in with Love, etc, which picks up from one of his earlier novels, Talking It Over. That novel introduced readers to the married Gillian and Stuart, and then to Stuart’s best friend Oliver who proceeded to steal Gillian away from him. Talking It Over was a departure in that Barnes wrote it like a play, with the characters speaking directly to the reader. Having set up that device, Barnes was free to really play with their various voices and to let characters argue for their view of events. Love, etc picks up 10 years later, and is a better book than its predecessor precisely because Barnes has let his characters age a bit. His premise goes: "...every relationship contains within the ghosts, or the shadows, of all the other relationships it isn’t. All the abandoned alternatives, the forgotten choices, the lives you could have led but didn’t and haven’t." Stuart’s return to London, however, proves that for him nothing is abandoned, nor forgotten. Barnes’s delicacies are here for the taking. He relishes the England-France dichotomy and delivers it in Mme. Wyatt, Gillian’s French mother. In her awkward English she depicts her preference, and maybe Barnes’s, for a book "written with a good style which does not have an unhappy ending." But in Love, etc, Barnes is also freer with the cameo roles. Characters like Dr. Robb walk on for a page or two, offer an objective view of Oliver’s condition, and then disappear. The book is a quick, laughable read and not without substance, although Barnes likes to bury it within Oliver’s pompous harangues. Still, there’s a lot here to appreciate, and anyone who’s ever played their part in such a triangle will recognize the aftertaste that Barnes’s humour leaves.

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