Laura Barnett’s ‘The Versions of Us’ refuses to be a cliché. Three different versions of Eva and Jim’s story are told adjacently, after a pivotal meeting in which Eva is knocked off her bike as a Cambridge student in the 1950s. The premise of the novel hinges on the question of ‘what if’ – how certain encounters, decisions and actions can determine a whole different version of the path originally taken. But the novel challenges romanticism and is painfully realistic. The version in which Eva and Jim become romantically involved with each other immediately after the bike incident – indeed, the version in which they predict that their lives will be inextricably interwoven – is the version ending with an unhappy marriage, an affair and a separation.
The novel is profoundly psychologically apt, a difficult feat for a book in which the central characters experience three whole and very different lives. This is testament to the author’s insight into the human condition, and how it reacts to its surroundings and circumstances; Eva and Jim’s characters are consistent, but react and change subtly according to what happens to them. The result is three different, adult versions of each character, informed by their respective lives. Each character is insightfully built, their inner workings, ambitions and resentments laid out clearly in a scarily relatable way, irrespective of the reader’s standing. Just as the stories balance realism and idealism, the complicated narrative form, which switches between different stories, is counteracted by Barnett’s clear and relatable third-person narrative voice and the consistency of each character, whilst yet conveying dramatic jars and changes. Sometimes the perspective jumps 10 years into the future, with little other than the stark gap of two chapters to convey time lost, and circumstances changed.
The novel ultimately reduced me to tears in its subtle and profound understanding of the way in which love changes, people grow, relationships end and people betray you. For despite all this, it maintains a distinct distance from cynicism. No matter what happens in each ‘version of us’, Eva and Jim remain in each other’s lives until the end, through decades of re-entry and abandonment. As its form belies, the narrator’s hand seems to be the working of fate in which the reader – or at least this reader – wants to believe.
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