When writing becomes a habit

In the closing monologue of Talking It Over (1991), an elderly French landlady recalls her husband having once told her that "the English are a mad and violent race, and their sense of humour is very singular". Well, that does explain a lot when it comes to figuring out why Julian Barnes has chosen to return, some nine years on, to the bickering trio of former pals, Stuart and Oliver, and the woman they fell out over, and both married, in turn. As femme fatales go, the smug Gillian, picture restorer and mother of two, is a disappointment. Still, never mind. Love, etc. does not so much take up the tale of two husbands and one wife as continue the circular argument begun in Talking It Over, concerning who loves whom and why.

The madness and the violence is largely in the form of the appalling deeds committed in the name of love: revenge, power struggles, ritual humiliation and verbal point scoring. The humour is standard BBC: not too intellectual, not too earthy and kind of funny.

As with the first instalment, the tone is clever, jaunty, Home Counties English, defiantly jocular, with the main characters ever hovering between embarrassment and downright despair. But even at its grimmest, Love, etc. is no tragedy. It's not even poignant. It is an Ayckbourn-ish comedy of survival in which there are no rules. Or if there are, the characters - the sort of people you would really hate to end up sharing the last life raft with - have never learned them or simply choose to ignore all notions of fair play. Each of the protagonists speaks directly to the reader. It is a bit like hearing evidence, but too often tends to leave the reader feeling privy to a communal therapy session. There is another problem too, one that has dogged much of Barnes's fiction; he is famously clever, too clever in fact to be able to step back from his characters and allow them develop into convincing creations.

Instead there is Oliver the joker and Stuart his disgruntled straight man - still fighting over the sensible Gillian, a woman as confused as everyone else on the planet. This time round, the epigrammatic, Wildean Oliver is less funny than he used to be, while Stuart has become unsympathetic, calculating and power-crazed. Both are beyond eccentric. Yet while Oliver's particular form of glib lunacy has acquired a whiff of failure, Stuart's obsessive personality is slightly sinister. As for Gillian, she may regret having left Stuart for Oliver but Barnes, her puppet master, is more concerned with having her ponder the non-event known as marital sex.

If Barnes had placed more importance on the emotions rather than the intelligence of his characters, Love, etc. might have been a better novel. That said however, none of them ends up sounding like the stock tormented genius figures favoured by so many English novelists. Nor are they upper class with a flair for language worthy of Waugh. Instead they are ordinary and engaged in an ordinary, even banal, problem: a sexual triangle.

For all its artifice, and structured as it is on a series of monologues, often offering versions of the same events from contrasting viewpoints, the novel is readable, even plausible - to a point. It is more random, indeed is almost haphazard and lacks the urgency of the first book, and the central trio are not so much unsympathetic as uninteresting. Oliver, previously a star turn, is now an unemployable depressive. Stuart has another divorce behind him, a new business, an interest in organic farming and a different set of tactics.

Art is not preoccupying Barnes here; he is attempting to get a sense of a real life situation. Yet though working with first person voices and through a number of characters who reckon they have all suffered emotionally, the overall effect remains coolly clever Barnes, all seeing, all knowing. His prose is unremarkable, largely because with the odd linguistic flourish from the once dazzling or at least flashy Oliver, now a grounded fish, the narrative is conversational and halfhearted.

The earlier novel, Talking It Over, opens with Stuart introducing himself and adding, "I remember everything". And so he does. The life histories of the respective characters come oozing out. When he reappears at the beginning of this new book, he says "Hello, we've met before . . . I remember you" and the reader's prior knowledge of the mess that went before is presumed. The stage is slightly more cluttered this time with more walk-on players, as Gillian and Oliver now have two daughters, and Stuart has an embittered American ex-wife. As with the first book, the monopoly on common sense and honesty is held by Gillian's mother. She is a worldly French woman betrayed by her schoolteacher husband who replaced her with one of his students. When making one of the more profound observations in Talking It Over Mme Wyatt decides "everyone is vulnerable to love, whatever they say, until the day one dies".

In the bleaker, more stagnant arena of Love, etc. she consistently emerges as the voice of reason and genuine emotional pain. "I do not think that I will have another lover in my lifetime. That is a thing you have to acknowledge at a certain point . . . It is not so much that I do not want, as I do not want to want. I do not desire to desire . . . Is this perhaps my punishment . . . to realise that all the heart trouble - is that the word? - which I endured, all that searching and all that pain, all that expectation, all those actions, were not, after all, as I thought, relevant to happiness? Is this my punishment?"

Born with "clever" written in the very lines upon his face, Barnes misses little, hence the hefty amount of wised-up observations included in his fictions. But somehow the real has never come easy to him. Love, etc. is easier to read than the earlier book, which has its flashes of wisdom and often disconcerts. This sequel confirms the trio incapable of contentment or trust. Barnes gives the impression he wrote it while standing on his head.

He may well have done so. For all its barbed reading of human misbehaviour, sexual jealousy and its nifty pace, it never develops into more than an adroitly wry performance from a detached observer who chooses to speak through assorted voices. For all his irony and surefootedness, Barnes has never surpassed the grace and originality of his inspired third novel, Flaubert's Parrot (1984). Despite its deja deja vu cunning, Love, etc. is a bit of an afterthought, reiterating that the pragmatic Barnes is at best a talented ventriloquist, more interested in behavioural psychology than stories.

Eileen Battersby is Literary Correspondent of The Irish Times