Crusader

Issue date: 4/23/04 Section: Features

Talking it Over

By Julian Barnes

288 pages

Vintage Books. $13.00 (paperback)



As a plot device, the love triangle has a lot going for it. There's suspense about how the triangle will be resolved. There's generally a happy ending, since two of the members of the triangle usually end up together. And there's some degree of bitter sweetness involved; there's always the odd person out who's left with nothing but thoughts of what might have been maybe a consolation romance. This general setup has worked in sentimental novels and popular romantic comedies for ages, as anyone who has frequented a movie theater in the past year can tell you.

In Talking it Over, Julian Barnes takes this basic idea - two men in love with the same woman - and does something slightly different with it by allowing the characters involved to speak for themselves. Each chapter is composed of at least three separate narratives, as Stuart, Oliver and Gillian each try to establish their view of events as the truth. The result is unsettling; we're not really sure whom to believe or sympathize with.

Basically, Stuart and Oliver have been best friends since childhood, despite their very different personalities; Stuart is a meticulously organized and self-described "boring" banker, while Oliver is a perpetually unemployed free spirit with intellectual pretensions. One summer, Stuart meets Gillian through a dating service. Oliver spends time with them as they date, and serves as Stuart's best man at the wedding, only to come to the very inconvenient realization, as he sees Gillian in her wedding dress, that he's in love with her too. After the couple returns from their honeymoon, Oliver devotes most of his time to making Gillian fall in love with him and leave Stuart.

In one sense, the effect of having these characters all tell their own sides of the story is rather dampening; none of them come off as particularly sympathetic. Here, I think, Barnes is deliberately throwing some cold water on our conventional ideas of love as pure, unadulterated emotion that, if left alone, will fix our problematic lives. His characters are genuinely enough in love, but there's also a lot of rather devious machination that they engage in for the purposes of winning the object of that love. Society, for example, sometimes tends to see adultery as a bit of an accomplishment; one partner escapes a stagnating marriage that's killing his or her spirit and finds a new and unrestricted love with someone else. The problem with that image of adultery is that, in order to be at all pretty, it needs to be viewed from far away and in a dim light. Yes, it may be romantic and so forth that Oliver is in love with Gillian, but when he repeatedly and almost without compunction lies to his best friend with the object of stealing his wife, he starts to look less romantic and more like a cad.

It seems like Barnes is trying to say that there is no such thing as a relationship without any restrictions - that is, there is no such thing as a totally romantic relationship. Sooner or later, some sort of manipulation or deceit creeps in, as indeed becomes more and more apparent as the book continues. As you might have guessed, Talking it Over does not end happily (ambiguously, at best), and the recently published sequel, Love, etc. is even darker. I do recommend both, however, not only as a bit of an antidote to the romantic comedy of the week, but also because they provide some fairly humorous insight into the perpetual human problem of attempting to find some compromise between our reason and our emotions.

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