Memories and regret

The Sense of an Ending

Julian Barnes

JonathanCape

London, 2011

Price: 12.99 pounds

Shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize 2011, The Sense of an Ending is a brilliant piece of work, not least because, unlike almost every other book I have read this year, it is less than 500 pages. If ever there were a reason to extol Julian Barnes’ mastery of literature – in terms of both form and function – this would be it, the fact that he is able to compose and deliver a forceful narrative in 150 pages of spare, precise prose.

Like many of Barnes’ narrators, Tony Webster is a normal, ordinary Everyman. He is utterly unremarkable, other than in his ability to have managed to live an unassuming life with neither too much success, nor too much failure. A reasonable career leading to modestly comfortable retirement is the extent of his professional life and, on the personal front, he has managed to marry, divorce amiably and produce a daughter who is just as comfortably married and settled. In fact, if not for his own self-awareness, Webster would be a fairly pathetic sort of character. His only regular human contact seems to be with his ex-wife, Margaret, who also seems to be his only friend.

But like many people, Webster has spectacular, interesting recollections of his life back in the day. In particular, his memory focuses on the brilliant, tragic Adrian, a school friend possessed of such intellectual panache that a history teacher once offers, in all seriousness, to nominate him as the successor to his own job. It is Adrian who is both the subject and the victim of Barnes’ compact volume which at its heart is all about memory — individual memory, and how it simultaneously constructs and deconstructs ourselves: how who we once were, is what we seek to become, while at the same time, we repudiate ourselves. Conducting spiritual and psychic auto-lobotomies is de rigeur, if Barnes’ coy hints in the form of Webster’s reminiscences are any indication, and the gap between perception and reality only increases with age.

We see this dissonance as Webster thinks back to his former girlfriend, Veronica, at whose family home he spent a weekend, quite literally a lifetime ago. Veronica, who is ineffable at best – at least through the lens of the narrator’s perception – later takes up with Adrian, who then goes on to commit suicide. And finally, oddly enough, there is the matter of a legacy left to Webster by Veronica’s mother, a legacy that consists of some cash andAdrian’s diary. It is this diary that pushes forward the plot of the novel, as Webster tries to track down the elusive tome which seems to hold within it all manner of revelation (like all good diaries emerging from a secret-shrouded past should). In hunting for the diary, Webster finds himself re-engaging with Veronica — who alternates between giving him the time of day and accusing him of “just not getting it”. Angry and frustrated (although by what, we never really know), Veronica is far more than “The Fruitcake” Webster describes her as to his ex-wife. How much more is something we only realise as Barnes unravels the cobwebs laced through Webster’s memories.

The Sense of an Ending is fundamentally the story of a quest but what begins as a slight puzzler ends up with both Tony and the reader unsure as to what is actually going on. Alan Hollinghurst has done something similar in The Stranger’s Child but it has taken him three times the number of pages to explore the transience and dynamism of memory and perception. Barnes is far more precise – and in all fairness, he is dealing with a much more limited landscape – but in no way does he sacrifice complexity at the altar of sparse prose. Why is Veronica so bipolar? What could have been so awful thatAdrianwould end his own life? Why does Webster seem to be rewriting his past every time he visits it? These memories are like oil shimmering on water — beautiful from a distance, but viscous and poisonous upon exposure. As they form patterns within patterns, what emerges is a treatise – a Zen meditation, almost – on memory, its mutability and regret.