Book Review: "Before She Met Me" by Julian Barnes

Julian Barnes is one of my favourite authors ever. I spent a long time in my teens reading his works and until a few years ago, Arthur and George was my favourite book by him. Recently, that has been replaced by his newer book about the Belle Epoch called The Man in the Red Coat. Julian Barnes is truly one of the greatest literary talents of the 20th and 21st centuries with his deep wit, his characterisation of incredibly realistic people and his nature to make you laugh and cry - both within the matter of a few pages. Julian Barnes is a massively great author and with his new work in 2022, I hope he continues to write even more. This review is about the 1982 novel Before She Met Me.

The novel opens with a man who is thoroughly discontented with his wife. He sees that she no longer really appreciates his existence. Graham is stuck up his own behind, self-centred and comes off as egotistical. His first wife comes off as yes, slightly nagging, but what can you expect of a long-term marriage - it does not come without its downfalls. When Graham divorces her, he finds himself a new love in a slightly younger woman whom he thinks is the woman of his dreams. She is beautiful, wispy, kind of air-headed and won't talk back to him. She is also an actress. But, when Graham starts to investigate her past, there are things that pop up which show him red flags to his own ego, killing his sense of self and producing a narcissism so great that he will stop at nothing to cut all of her connections with this past of hers.

The character of Graham I think, is supposed to be wholly unlikeable, he has no real redeeming factors and you do wonder how these two women even fell in love with him in the first place. He is all of the following things at once: overly needy towards the women, egotistical towards his own self-worth compared to others, self-serving in that he is not all too kind to others on the whole and he is also a strange mixture between a narcissist and a man who has absolutely no direction of where he is going other than that he needs a wife that is more placated and more attractive than his previous one.

I think it is the fixation on that idea of marrying the actress that causes the reaction when he gets to know about her past. When we meet the character of Jack, for example, even his first wife becomes worried at the aspects of his obsession and fears for other people's lives. This is caused not by the past of the actress herself but his obsession with her from the very moment he fell in love with her. He idealised her so much that finding out about her past was too overwhelming and his world felt shattered. He concluded that he had judged her character wrong. For an egotistical man to be proven wrong, as we know, is a dangerous game in which people could die.

To conclude, Graham is one of Julian Barnes' strongest characters as he shows us the world of sexual jealousy, exploitation and the world of the ego-centric male who thinks he is better than everyone else and everything he does. All in all, Julian Barnes is actually trying to show us one other thing that I thought was hilarious - and this is why I love Barnes as an author - he's trying to show you that Graham, though he has all these bad qualities of a human being - is just like every other man you'll meet. He is unassuming in every other way.