I remember first seeing Julian Barnes’ The Sense of an Ending at school. Twenty copies used to sit in one of the classrooms I had English lessons in – I imagined it was on some A-level syllabus as a recent masterpiece, which predisposed me to dislike it. (It was some time before I realised authors could write alright without first being dead.) It did win the Man Booker Prize in 2011, which is practically yesterday, after all. And certainly, if we want to be uncharitable, this is a book that can be knocked down by pigeonholing it as one of those books that seems written to secure a place on a syllabus. We have a textbook unreliable narrator, a dualistic structure to consider, a limited number of characters, things to talk about, literary references, school days, and a length which means even the laziest schoolkid might actually read it, or at least be able to sprint through it on the night before the exam. With that said, readers expecting me to rehash my criticism of Schlink’s dreadful The Reader will be disappointed for the simple reason that The Sense of an Ending is actually pretty good.
There are two stories here, one for each of the novel’s two parts. Tony Webster tells his life story in the first part, or at least the life story he thought was his own. He goes to school and has three friends including the intelligent Adrian Finn, then they head their separate ways and begin drifting apart. At university, Tony meets a girl, Veronica, stays once at her house for the weekend and later introduces her to his friends, before eventually breaking up with her. He later discovers that Adrian, who ended up at Cambridge, is now going out with Veronica. He writes them a postcard and a letter, the latter of which he barely remembers, and then sometime later learns that Adrian has committed suicide. In his note, Adrian explains his decision with reference to philosophy and the importance of free will. This existential flourish seems in line with the Adrian that Tony knew at school, so he agrees with his friends that the death is a shame, but not out of character. Tony then finishes university, gets married and has a child, gets divorced and retires, and that’s really as much as we get. “And that’s a life, isn’t it?” – one told from beginning to apparent end. There are some disappointments, some pleasures, but really it is a slightly cautious, empty thing.
The second part begins when the older Tony receives information that he has been given a little money and two documents through the will of a certain Mrs Ford – Veronica’s mother. We are just as confused as he is. The first of these documents is a short and ambiguous letter from Mrs Ford, while the second is a diary – Adrian’s diary – which has been taken by Veronica and which Tony then spends much of the second story trying to get back. Here is our mystery. Why does Mrs Ford have the diary, why is she giving him the money? Tony’s rather confused attempts at working all this out and what he discovers along the way is what The Sense of an Ending is, in essence, about. It completely changes our reading of the first part because it turns out not that Tony has been coy about the truth, but rather that he has simply forgotten it and let it fade. The new information of the second part is a rude awakening that forces him to look back at his life again and interrogate how it all really took place.
Narrative
At its heart, The Sense of an Ending is about the stories we tell ourselves. It’s about the lies that Tony has told himself his whole life, and the “truth” he eventually discovers. Adrian, ever precocious, quotes the Frenchman Patrick Lagrange: ‘“History is that certainty produced at the point where the imperfections of memory meet the inadequacies of documentation.”’ The first part of the novel is one certainty, the certainty that Tony has about his life based on the memories he has retained of it. The second part concerns the new “history” that writes itself when he finds documentation that does not sit easily next to his original view of things.
Tony is well aware of how this all works. The novel is full of philosophical asides that work well to hammer in its themes. “How often do we tell our own life story? How often do we adjust, embellish, make sly cuts? And the longer life goes on, the fewer are those around to challenge our account, to remind us that our life is not our life, merely the story we have told about our life. Told to others, but – mainly – to ourselves.” Tony does meet Veronica again, but he never sees more than a page of the diary – for she has burned it. Her excuse, “People shouldn’t read other people’s diaries”, is not unreasonable. To read a diary in which you figure is guaranteed to knock you off balance, because it reveals the unadulterated vision of history that belongs to someone else, and thus necessarily contradicts your own.
Worse still is when Tony receives a copy of the letter that he had sent to Adrian and Veronica after hearing that they were going out. In the novel’s first part the letter is passed over briefly as if it were of no importance at all, but we later see that this is an evasion – by Tony or by his subconscious, we cannot say. The letter is brutal, nasty, and exceptionally spiteful. And it is the last thing he ever sent to his friend before he died. Tony cannot deny that it is his letter, but he does not seem able to accept it fully either:
I reread this letter several times. I could scarcely deny its authorship or its ugliness. All I could plead was that I had been its author then, but was not its author now. Indeed, I didn’t recognise that part of myself from which the letter came. But perhaps this was simply further self-deception.
Taken as a whole, The Sense of an Ending is full of things that seem to separate us from anything close to the truth, with language itself being a particular target. Early on, for example, Tony notes how the word “going out” has changed in its definition over the course of his own lifetime, making us aware of how at a basic level the words we read and understand now may not correspond to what Tony is actually trying to convey. At another point, after talking to a solicitor, Tony notes how his own linguistic independence seems to be lost in conversation with them – “Have you noticed how, when you talk to someone like a solicitor, after a while you stop sounding like yourself and end up sounding like them?” Finally, there is the newspaper report of Adrian’s death, the ‘Tragic Death of “Promising” Young Man’, which is so cliché at this point that the words are essentially empty.
It’s not for nothing, then, that Veronica seems to spend the entire book telling Tony that he just doesn’t “get it”. If our memories are faulty, just as faulty will likely be our attempts to fix them. Early on in the first part, while discussing history writing, Adrian says that the only way to understand a given work of history is to understand its author’s biases. But we cannot, because they are too complicated, and often too deeply hidden. One comes away from The Sense of an Ending rather battered, clutching the solution to the mystery that Tony does eventually reach, but with a feeling that so much has been lost in the search for it that we might have been better off just staying in the novel’s staid and stable first part.
All in all, I did enjoy The Sense of an Ending. I had read some rather hostile reviews that had said it was a work of philosophy with nary a novel in sight. This criticism falls flat to me. Of course, the novel does indulge in a lot of introspection, but it does not feel out of place. As far as I am aware, older people do tend to reflect on their lives – Tony is not unique in this. Its main fault is that Tony does tend to repeat himself and the same ideas in only slightly varying phrases, which is tedious by the end. The plot here is sufficiently meaty, the characters sufficiently real, to satisfy me, even if it does suffer from that problem that most introspective works do, namely that it’s a little claustrophobic and airless. There are not enough characters, nor enough vibrancy, at times.
To end with I want to note that it’s interesting how we have come to this sort of novel. The great modernist writers loved their interiority and stream-of-consciousness. Now, with that vein fully excavated, we move from the experience of the present into the experience of the past and the failures of memory and interpretation – as we did in Ishiguro’s The Remains of the Day or Sebald’s The Emigrants. This is a mere musing on my part, not an exact science – after all, Ford’s The Good Soldier came out in 1915. However, perhaps what I am trying to suggest is that there is no sense that Tony is deliberately confounding us here. Instead, we simply have a world that is hard to make sense of because we are all, all of us, reliant upon memories that do not match up with those of others or to the world itself. In this sense at least it is a somewhat forgiving novel, and one that possesses a message valid for our own lives.
Anyway, it’s an interesting little book and easily readable in a single sitting.