The Sense of an Ending [Audiobook, CD] [Audio CD]

Julian Barnes' very short new novel, currently nominated for the Man Booker Prize, is by no means perfect -- but it is very much authentic, and that counts for a lot with me. As its title suggests, it is written by a man approaching 70, like Barnes himself, looking back on his youth and re-evaluating. This may be a limitation for younger readers, but it is what one does around that age, and Barnes handles it with impressive honesty. As an Englishman of very similar background myself, and only a year or two older, I found the book uncannily full of echoes from my own life, and no doubt those of many others: the group of friends in high-school who go their separate ways, the strange limbo of early sixties sex, a friend's suicide, the mystery of a never quite forgotten first girlfriend. I have not felt so much part of a novel since reading Ian McEwan's ON CHESIL BEACH; this may bias my review, but it also speaks to a depth of personal connection in the author's mind too. This makes the book, short though it is, a vast improvement on Barnes' recent set of short stories, PULSE, and almost as good as THE LEMON TABLE, the wonderful collection that preceded it.

Tony Webster is a man in his later sixties, divorced, the father of a grown daughter, and comfortably retired. Then a letter arrives that sends him back in memory to his high-school days and his friendship with Adrian Finn, a brilliant student clearly destined for great things. While Adrian is indeed achieving academic success at Cambridge, Tony pursues his studies at a provincial university, devoting as much time to a mostly-unconsummated relationship with Veronica Ford, his girlfriend from a rather more upscale family. Then, when Tony is visiting in America, Adrian dies. There seems no mystery about it at the time, but when Tony is forced to reconsider after a gap of forty-some years, his search becomes a moral calculus, weighing the value of that one life against what he's made of his own, settling for an undistinguished career and marriage, calling it comfort but really meaning cowardice.

The opening sections of the novel have strong similarities to Alan Bennett's play THE HISTORY BOYS, and the question of what constitutes history runs all through the book. The teenage Tony quotes Churchill's aphorism that "History is written by the victors," but his teacher counters that "it is also the self-delusion of the defeated." As Tony looks back on his life, different and sometimes surprising versions of the truth will emerge, and the question of winners and losers will by no means be so clear. This is the intellectual mystery of the book, and I found it fascinating. But you cannot write a novel on philosophical and literary reflections alone; there need also be events, shifts of direction, surprise revelations. Here I think Barnes falls short. The disclosures in the last section of the story, pulled like rabbits out of the hat, are in my opinion inadequately prepared in the first half. So while Barnes ties up the mysteries with the neatness of a PD James or Agatha Christie, he leaves Tony's personal calculus disappointingly open-ended.

I guess I'll just have to work out my own past in my own way!

Don't be intimidated by its brevity. A little book with big ideas. Barnes, a runner-up for Man Booker prizes will finally get his just reward. Few books are worth reading more than once. This is one of them. History, false history, memory and false memory. A fictionalised memoire of Tony Webster reflecting on his adolescence with three then four friends, the latter, Adrian Finn, destined to greatness. Adrian's philosophical musing about a fellow student's suicide foreshadowing what is to come. "Life is a gift bestowed without anyone asking for it...if [one] decides to renounce the gift no one asks for, it is a moral and human duty to act on the consequences of that decision". Heady stuff this.

Part One is Tony's admittedly selective and possibly faulty memory of his school days and his faltering romance with Veronica. His marriage to Margaret and the birth of a daughter, subsequent divorce and the marriage of his daughter are summarily dismissed in a page or two. Part Two finds Tony in advanced middle age realising that he never accomplished much and just flowed along the river of life going wherever it carried him. A fragment of a diary left to him in Adrian's will starts him on his quest of trying to set things right by reconnecting with Veronica. In the last couple of pages we learn Tony got it all wrong, "you just don't get it" as Veronica had always told him. Barnes has left us with a bit of a cliff hanger or at least makes us reread sections of the book much as Tony has had to re-interpret his own life.

Book reviews in the Guardian and Globe and Mail do the book more justice. A true gem, Julian Barnes will be remembered.

Julian Barnes' new novel, The Sense of an Ending *), is an intimate reflection on memory and its unreliability over time. Writing in the voice of sixty-something-year-old Anthony Webster, a "peaceable man", Barnes explores convincingly how the brain grows selective and untrustworthy with age, reinterpreting how "what you end up remembering isn't always the same as what you have witnessed... Thus, the reader is put on notice from the beginning that what we read may not be quite what it will turn out to be.

Isolated memory snippets open the novel: a "shiny inner wrist; a river rushing nonsensically upstream, its wave and wash lit by half a dozen chasing torchbeams; another river...; bathwater long gone cold behind a locked door". Initially we don't really know where we are and who is talking. The narrator wonders about "everyday" time - "it holds us and moulds us"; pain or pleasure can give us the illusion of its stretching or contracting... Something has triggered his musings that take his mind back to "a few incidents that have grown into anecdotes, to some approximate memories which time has deformed into certainty."

Those incidents take us without much transition to his adolescent years, when growing up is as daunting as it is exciting: close friendships are an essential component, so are school and teachers, and the mounting physical urge for intimate encounters... Barnes is perceptive and astute in his depiction of Tony and his trio of close friends. Adrian, "a tall, shy boy who initially kept his eyes down and his mind to himself..." stands out in terms of intelligence and his admiration for Camus's existentialist philosophy. The others, while joining in the wide-ranging debates in class - on history, on "Birth, Copulation, and Death", on poetry - are more concerned with "getting" a girl or pretending to... These are the early nineteen-sixties and the sexual liberation may be spreading elsewhere but not here.

Then, school is out and life moves on... fast forward. An early tragedy, rather than bringing them together, pushes the friends further apart. So, what, forty odd years later, brought all these memories back to the fore in Tony's mind? Why does his first girlfriend's "You don't get it, do you...!?" comes back to haunt him after all these years? Didn't she not call him a "coward" then, but why? Along the way, we receive few hints as to the connections between past and present. Barnes holds his cards close to his chest, just giving us enough context to want to keep reading... It is only when reaching the novel's concluding pages that we are confronted with scenarios that challenge our own recollections of what might have happened earlier on. Did we get caught out in the memory game by missing sublte clues, by interpreting behaviour and events to suit our image of the hero? Could our perception of Anthony Webster's character potentially "stand up in court"? For me personally, the ending of the book made my reading of the book as a whole much more meaningful. The first part, set in the school and boys' environment, while well captured and interesting in a detached sort of way, did not overly engage my female mind. Yet, after reaching the last pages I looked back at the earlier depictions of people and events and felt them bringing out additional layers and depths to the story. In the end, did Barnes leave enough clues for his readers to solve all of the puzzles? It is up to the reader to decide. [Friederike Knabe]

*) shortlisted for this year's Man Booker Prize