The Versions of Us for me, started off as one confusing bumpy ride. It took me some time to immerse into the three storylines. It is very easy to lose track of the story with its many characters that drift in and out over the different time periods. The fascinating concept of exploring the “what-ifs” that could change the course of the time to come, is what made me want to read it. The novel is your usual love story with three possible trajectories.
It all starts with that very moment on a wintery sunny morning when Eva meets Jim for the first time at Cambridge, in 1958. She falls of her bike and he helps her back up. The other two versions begin with this same meet cue, yet both taking different routes than the first. The first of what will be many bump-ins to come over the following decades. One story explores the possibility of Jim and Eva, while the other paves alternative road to Eva and David, her college sweetheart. These versions shadow the lives of the three protagonists from their young love in their 20s to the highs and lows of their careers and lives into their 40s and further more.
Through the shifting stages, one thing that is constant is the personalities of Eva, Jim and David - Jim, an artist, Eva, a writer and David an actor. All three versions have the same tune playing in the background as the settings change with the growing characters. There were many instances where one scene was narrated through altered vantage points, which were so knottily thought of and written. Despite knowing what was going to happen, I liked reading how each of them unfolded.
Another thought that crossed my mind while reading this book was the sense of destiny, something we all secretly like to believe in. Though small moments can change the arc of our lives, there are those things that are going to happen either way, no matter which path you take.
For her first novel, Barnett has skillfully written this charming story. The Version of Us of is a well written and a precisely thought through book. Having said that, the confusion of the versions in the first part got me riled up trying to remember the each story than really getting into it. Out of the three I was most intrigued by Eva’s character. How, through time and across versions, she was the same yet showing a new side to her as she matured. Through the second part I finally had a grasp on the variants and got more engrossed in the happenings of Eva’s many lives; enough to develop a soft corner for one of the versions, which I was completely drawn to.
“Ours was a good love, Eva tells him in her mind. Not the giddy love of teenagers, or that of a married couple in middle age, frayed by work, home, children, by the hue and cry of the everyday; but its own, pure thing, true to itself, answerable to no one, to nothing.”