Book Review | The Sense of an Ending

After the usual controversy surrounding awards, Julian Barnes finally won this year’s Man Booker Prize, having been short-listed three times before.

Many were predicting that he would again not win the award with this novel for it was too short. But I have a predilection for small books for I find that they are often powerful vehicles for big ideas.

The concise novel can be imbued with an intensity which is often lacking in more sprawling, complex narratives. Julian Barnes’s latest offering – The Sense of an Ending –belongs to this category. This is a very slim book, a novella really, but it is a profound reflection on life.

The book deals with the mutability of memory, false recollection, remorse, sex, guilt and death. The elegant presentation of the hard back edition lined in black is like a memento mori, and the very title emphasises the theme of an ending.

The title could also have been inspired by another well known book with the same title written by the eminent critic Frank Kermode, which contains a collection of his classic lectures on literature.

One thing is for certain, that by the end of the book you will not be so sure that this is an ending.

The narrator, Tony Webster, is a retired man in his sixties, a rather dull person, reasonably content with his mediocre life, who is trying to make some sense of his past.  A ‘peaceable’ character – that’s how he sees himself.

At the beginning of the book, Tony is reminiscing about his school friends and in particular about his relationship with Adrian Finn, a precociously intelligent boy. Finn goes on to Cambridge, while Tony in Bristol encounters the enigmatic Veronica Ford. He remembers his awkward sexual experience with her and the end of the ‘affair’. Veronica starts a relationship with Finn and they eventually get married.

Tony also marries, has a child, divorces and remains on good terms with his ex-wife. Later, Tony discovers that Finn has committed suicide.

When he finds that Veronica’s mother, whom he had once met briefly, left him a small legacy on her death, and Finn’s diary, which Veronica refuses to hand over, Tony tries to make some sense of this sequence of events and to find his part in this tragedy.

But it soon becomes clear that when it comes to remembering the past, one edits and erases memories. This is the focus of the novel – the mutability of memory.

As Tony tries to understand the events in his placid, uneventful life, the story takes on an altogether different path, becoming much darker and eventually shocking.

After meeting with Veronica in a bid to try to get Finn’s diary, he is forced to examine what he thinks his life has been, and it becomes clear how unreliable is subjective memory. Something dark and forgotten by Tony resurfaces to confront him. This will make him re-evaluate his life with shame and remorse.

The novel is skillfully plotted to show how the unknown and the unspoken, what is lost to memory, are as alive as what is remembered. When Adrian commits suicide, Tony accepts the possibility that this was an existential decision taken by his friend to renounce life seeing it as ‘the gift bestowed without anyone asking for it’.

But more than once Veronica tells Tony: ‘You just don’t get it’ and neither do we, the readers, until the very end. At the end of the novel, as Tony has to rethink his life, the unexpected revelations will also make us go over what we have just read, so that like Tony we try to make sense of the ending.

Barnes merits the award for this is a fine novel, where every word is chosen with skill, cleverly manipulating the readers, to reveal the dark mystery at the heart of the novel, but only at the very end. It is a short novel but it poses many philosophical questions.

Are our memories false? How much can they be trusted?  And what about our ‘forgettings’? How is it logically possible to remember these? What are the limits of self-knowledge? And how do we reconcile ourselves to the process of ageing and death?  

'Is the purpose of life to reconcile us to its eventual loss’? At the end of the book one does not feel so sure that the ending has brought closure either for Tony or for us.

This might be one of the shortest books ever to win a major literary prize but it poses complex, disturbing questions on the human experience.