Bound up in love, intellect and history, the well-observed characters narrate their own versions of the story, allowing room for differing perspectives and humorous, sometimes painfully intrusive insights.

Always utterly readable, Barnes's character-driven, unaffected style lends itself perfectly to this love-triangle scenario between three kindred spirits. at the same time beautifully simple and painfully complex.


the condemned   September 12, 2000
 1 out of 1 found this review helpful

Ths is a fascinating book and particularly so from thr point of view of the narrator / author / interviewer. The first part (short) is a retrospective look back over their lives so far, childhood, school, scrapes with bullies etc, meeting each other and the arrival of Gillian.

Stuart and Gill show the power of a narrator, of an author controlling the flow of information by trying to edit Gill's arrival on the scene by fiction, but life is not fiction and they find tha the forces of human nature are too strong or humans too weak and the story unravels once the weakness of the story is (albeit only obliquely) tested. Lesson 1, narration must be strong, Barnes is the strongest in his field.

But we have a real narrator whop plays a masterly game, allowing the characters to tell the story iun their own time using their own language. It's like listening to a more thoughtful radio 4 programme like "on the ropes" or even "in the psyciatrists chair" where a simple question can unlock a stream of thoughts and recollections. Some extremely vivid, as now we are telling the story in the present tense. When the actoprs show their anger one can really feel it, as if you could see them blowing their tops.

The great thing is that the narrator does not know, the characters do not know, so we certainly don't know what is going to happen. They are telling the story of what happened a few days ago, how on earth can they know how it will end? Lesson 2, life is bewildering, a book which wants to depict individuals caught in these circumstances must show this bewilderment as vididly as possible. The language evolves to suit this style, Oliver with his gorgeously pompous condescending sneer uses words to impress. The lesson is best seen through Oliver who can speak like Oscar Wilde but at times is reduced to muttering profanities and even that with difficulty, such is his state of mind.

It is a masterpiece of narration, the way lives can change in a short period of time, narrated in their own words, you can sense bewilderment at the state their in, they don't know what next. But the narrator sticks with them to find out. It's the reverse of something like Camus's the Outsider where at the end we know he wrote it all after tragic events. Everything can be seen, therefore, as leading up to the present day. Here we can look back but we have to work at what has been said to glean evidence of how present circumstances might have been predicted.

Julian Barnes writes like an angel and this book is his best. Better even than Martin Amis's book with similar themes and style, Success, which until now i had thought beyond compare.


A story about individuals and relationships   August 31, 2000
Julian Barnes tells a story which starts from a very easy going scenario and evolves into a tragic love triangle. This story is told from the different (and not necessarily honest) perspectives of the individuals involved in the triangle, and it is amazing to see them analyse themselves and each other, change their point of views, and mutate slowly into completely different characters. A very good read!


Three voices   April 18, 2000
The initial premise is misleadingly simple: take a classic love triangle and have the voices of the three protagonists recount their versions of it to an unseen interviewer - intercut them as in a film; tell the same incident from different perspectives or let each take up the narrative in turn; allow the occasional external commentator to speak and watch the reactions. Explore how each excuses, explains, contradicts and analyses what happened, trying to justify themselves, and watch how our perceptions of the characters change.

Stuart, the sensible optimist, middle of the road, unambitiously happy is by the end cynical, obsessive, unable to let go of the past or to disengage. From being a dull but worthy character at the start, by the end there is something repulsive and sinister about him.

By contrast, Oliver, venter of vertiginous prose pictures, charmer, entertainer, coward, hogger of the central stage, is by the end driven to violence towards the wife he stole from his best friend, fleeing a life in France where, with an undemanding job teaching English, a small garden and a baby he could, in a quiet way, have been happy.

The enigma is Gillian herself. At the outset an anti-heroine, not wanting to participate in the game of trying to explain all to the interviewer but dragged into it by the others, by the end she thought that she was in control,and deliberately drove and goaded Oliver to the edge of violence, knowing that in a house across the road, her ex-husband was watching.........

No-one is clear about their motivations for their actions, however hard they protest, or indeed what the result will be - each is out of control, even Gillian who does not really expect to be on the receiving end of a blow, and perhaps in the end, without either man.

A simple premise, but it is the execution that is impressive - in this case it is sustained, perceptive, entertaining, with a slightly voyeuristic feel to it. Well worth reading.