The Sense of an Ending

"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."

I've read one other book by Julian Barnes, Nothing to Be Frightened Of, which is an examination of attitudes about death. In his novel The Sense of an Ending, which won the U.K.'s Mann Booker Prize, Barnes is interested in memory, and how time changes it.

The narrator is Tony Webster. In the first half of the book he is a schoolboy: "Yes, of course we were pretentious--what else is youth for? We used terms like 'Welteschauung' and 'Sturm und Drang,' enjoyed saying 'That's philosophically self-evident,' and assured one another that the imagination's first duty was to be transgressive."

Into Tony's small circle of friends is admitted Adrian, a new boy who fits into the group but also manages to stand outside it. Tony also gets a girlfriend, Veronica, who is a bit of a snob and a prig. They end up ending badly, and Tony goes off to college. He hears from Adrian, who tells him that he is seeing Veronica, and he hopes that's okay. It is Tony's recollection, some 40 years later, that the had no problem with it. Sometime later he hears that Adrian has killed himself.

"It had seemed to us philosophically self-evident that suicide was every free person's right: a logical act when faced with terminal illness or senility; a heroic one when faced with torture or the avoidable deaths of others; a glamorous one in the fury of disappointed love (see: Great Literature). None of these categories had applied in the case of Robson's squalidly mediocre action. Nor did any of them apply to Adrian.

In the second half of the book, Tony is retired, divorced, and a grandfather. He hears from a solicitor that Veronica's mother, whom he only met once, has died and left him a small sum of money, plus another surprising item. That item is currently in Veronica's possession, so he reconnects with her in an attempt to get it back, and also, he must admit, because he is once again in her thrall (though when he discusses her with his ex-wife, she refers to her, through Tony's description of her, as the "fruitcake.") Veronica agrees to meet him, and they have enigmatic exchanges, that leads to Tony having to confront something ugly he did from his past.

Most of the book's slim pages are filled with Barnes, as Tony, ruminating on the nature of history, time and memory. Though much of it has an epigrammatic quality, I found it lyrical and engaging. We get Bartlett's stuff like: "History isn't the lies of the victors, as I once glibly assured Old Joe Hunt; I know that now. It's more the memories of the survivors, most of whom are neither victorious nor defeated," or, "When we're young, everyone over the age of thirty looks middle-aged, everyone over fifty antique. And time, as it goes by, confirms that we weren't that wrong. Those little age differentials, so crucial and so gross when we are young, erode. We end up all belonging to the same category, that of the non-young."

This book can only have been written by a person of mature years; Barnes just turned 66. This is the type of work that comes from living a life in which memory plays tricks, and recollections of actions we are not proud of get buried, but then can surface again after a hard rain. It's a lovely, quick read, but also full of profound insight, which is philosophically self-evident.