Stephanie Jones: Book Review - The Versions of Us by Laura Barnett

Like the painter’s triptych it contains, The Versions of Us is a portrait of lives lived in triplicate, and the product of first-time novelist Laura Barnett’s brimming imagination. The sliding-doors premise is a brave one – a ‘what if’ theme can go wildly off-track if a writer fails to keep their creative fecundity firmly in hand – and here it succeeds thanks to Barnett’s insistent focus on her central couple, the linchpin in each of three versions of their story.

Eva Edelstein and Jim Taylor first encounter one another as “young, untouchable, free” students at Cambridge University in October 1958. In version one, their meet-cute – Eva is struck by Jim’s kindness in helping her recover from a fall from her bike – seems destined, and leads directly to an untroubled courtship and long marriage.

In the second version, their encounter happens chiefly in its recounting by Eva to David Katz, a charismatic, self-absorbed acting student who will go on to become movie star David Curtis, her husband and father to her offspring.

Version three might be read in polarity to the first narrative: Jim abandons his pursuit of law to become a respected painter, enters coupledom and parenthood, but never ceases to yearn for Eva, to whom he remains connected by their shared acquaintances.

The story as a whole takes place over the better part of a lifetime, from the late 1950s to the second decade of the 21^st century, though timing is largely irrelevant, Barnett being unconcerned with setting or the current events of the day. Eva and Jim’s world is not one of politics or economics, but of the private, intimate and familial: unions made and ended, children born, raised and sometimes lost, parents buried.

Barnett is an enormously clever storyteller who exhibits great dexterity as she ushers her modest cast through several lives. She never loses control of the fundamental natures of Eva and Jim – they are the same people in every version, albeit on different paths – and juxtaposes the vividness and immediacy of early love with the blunt realization of the futility of trying to go back in time, to have your chance over again. The Versions of Us is the furthest thing from science fiction, but in another telling, one that indulged the human desire to go back and undo a mistake or seize a missed opportunity, the potential represented by the future could vanish in an instant.

As older people coming together for the first time, neither Eva nor Jim can truly rue their failure to connect as youngsters; there are children and grandchildren to bear witness to the rightness of their choices. Indeed, the first version proves that even a good marriage, as Eva decides theirs was, can founder; Jim is struck, on reflecting on the “silted build-up of the intervening decades”, by the contrast between the drunken bliss of their wedding and the place in which their coupledom settles decades later.

By turns romantic and nostalgic, The Versions of Us is inventive and captivating, and powerfully true to life. It may be kismet, but this course of true love never did run smooth.