Free Through the Window: Seventeen Essays and a Short Story (Vintage International) by Julian Barnes Page A

sheer boldness as a project. Greene wrote in 1962: ‘I don’t know how many times in nearly forty years I have come back to this novel of Ford’s, every time to discover a new aspect to admire.’
    Take the novel’s famous opening sentence, one of high plangency and enormous claim: ‘This is the saddest story I have ever heard.’ The first part of the sentence takes our attention and rightly so. It cannot logically be until the second reading (and it may not be until the third or fourth) that we note the falsity of the final word. Because it’s not a story Dowell, the narrator, has ‘heard’. It’s one in which he has participated, has been right up to the neck, heart and guts in; he’s the one telling it, we’re the ones hearing it. He says ‘heard’ instead of ‘told’ because he’s affecting distance from his ‘tale of passion’, declining to admit complicity. And if the second verb of the first sentence of the book is unreliable – if it gives a creak under the foot as we put our weight on it – then we must be prepared to treat every line as warily; we must prowl soft-footed through the text, alive for every board’s moan and plaint.
    This is a novel about the human heart. It says so on the first page. Yet the word is set differently in its first two appearances, once plainly, once between quotes. When is a heart not a heart? When it’s a medical condition, a ‘heart’. Ford plays for a while with this separation of meaning. We might expect that having a ‘heart’ means that affairs of the heart are offlimits. But this is a false facade: it seems that the two characters who are at Nauheim for medical purposes – Florence Dowell and Edward Ashburnham himself – are the very two who are indulging their unquote-marked hearts; whereas the two healthy onlookers, Dowell and Leonora Ashburnham, are the two with a different sort of heart trouble – hearts which are cold or killed. However, this paradox turns out to be a second false facade: Florence’s ‘heart’ is a fake, a got-up condition to keep her husband out of her bedroom; while later on welearn (or seem to learn – there is a lot of seeming to learn in this novel) that Ashburnham doesn’t have a ‘heart’ either: the Ashburnhams are in Nauheim because of Maisie Maidan, whom they have brought to the spa from India for treatment. She – Maisie – is (or seems to be) the only character in the novel who has a heart in both the amatory and medical senses of the word. Not surprisingly, she is soon to die.
    So the novel’s language shows its strategy. It plays with the reader as it reveals and conceals truth. And part of Ford’s great achievement is to find the perfect voice for paradoxical narrative. In Dowell he gives us a bluff, know-nothing narrator, who forgets to tell us his Christian name until the book is nearly over, and seems in his bumbling way to have wrecked his own story by giving away its outcome on page two. Ford uses an armchair bore to tell a story of great subtlety; also one of deep emotional cruelty and pain. He deploys the natural tropes and forgettings of a bad narrator to enrich the narrative, delay our understanding, and finally to deliver us the whole (or whole-ish) picture: in other words, he makes good narrative out of bad.
    Ford also plays relentlessly on the reader’s desire to trust the narrator. We want – or want to want – to believe what we are told, and dummy-like we fall into every pit dug for us. Even when we know we can’t trust Dowell, we carry on doing so, to our cost. This trustingness before narrative recidivism has its counterpart within the novel, in Leonora’s trustingness before Ashburnham’s sexual recidivism. Of course, it is our own ‘fault’ as readers: the hazard warnings are plain enough. ‘My wife and I knew Captain and Mrs Ashburnham as well as it is possible to know anybody, and yet, in another sense, we knew nothing at all about them.’ ‘Was that last remark of hers the