The Sense of an Ending by Julian Barnes

My rating: 4 of 5 stars


"And the longer life goes on, the fewer are those around us 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."

The Sense of an Ending is my first novel by Julian Barnes and it looks like I have found another favorite author. I agree with the critical acclaim and the prestigious Man Booker Prize the book received in 2011. Sense is a literary masterpiece: an extremely well written, serious, mature novel by an author who knows people and understands human nature. I am exhilarated by the fact that the book is so short and yet so deep and complete. On mere 170 pages of simple, lucid prose the author manages to say everything that he wants to say and does not waste even a single word for any extraneous stuff.

Tony, the narrator, now in his 60s, describes his youth in the 1960s. During his university studies Tony dates Veronica: he spends one weekend at her parents' house and the account of that humiliating weekend is one of narrative high points of the novel. Tony and Veronica eventually break with each other. The narrator quickly goes over the intervening years of Tony's life and brings us to the 2000s. A letter from a firm of solicitors sharply brings into the present the 40-year-old past that Tony has now to confront: the time warp experience deeply affects him. The dramatic scene of the near-denouement is unforgettable and - along with the "weekend in the 1960s" - forms an extraordinary narrative axis of the story.

Ostensibly the novel tells a cleverly constructed and compellingly interesting story, but the book really is about vagaries and unreliability of human memory. We think we remember the past but we really only remember our memories of the past, memories that we have perhaps unconsciously created. In this sense Mr. Barnes' novel is a wonderful complement to J.M. Coetzee's The Good Story (which I have just reviewed here), where Mr. Coetzee explains how we create our past rather than actually remember it, how our memories are reconstructions rather than reproductions. Moreover, I love the Mr. Barnes' insights about the elusiveness of psychological truth and - even more so - about the elusiveness of reality whose perception is always filtered through the story of ourselves that we have created.

And the wonderful ambiguity of the title! One could argue for three completely different interpretations of the word 'sense' in the title: Sense as in 'making sense'? Or sense as perception or feeling? Or sense as the 'meaning of'. If the latter, then the author is playfully self-referential, in the best post-modern style. I sincerely hope that the ambiguity was the author's goal and that we will never know what he "really meant."

Why am I rounding the 4.5-rating down for this extraordinary book? My criticism relates to the sense of the ending. I find the ending too 'neat', too 'reader-friendly', too 'perfect'. To me, the ending makes too much sense. I love not to be told everything at the end of a novel because I prefer to live with my vision of the sense of the book and I do not need an "official version"! Also, I find it ironic that the author seems to negate his own message: he who tells us that we do not really know our past eventually tells us what the past really was. Or does he?

Regardless of my picky criticisms, I enthusiastically recommend this adult, mature novel. Another wonderful quote that will strongly resonate with people of certain age follows the rating.

Four and a half stars.

"What did I know of life, I who lived so carefully? Who had neither won nor lost, but just let life happen to him? Who had the usual ambitions and settled all too quickly for them not being realized? Who avoided being hurt and called it a capacity for survival? Who paid his bills, stayed on good terms with everyone as far as possible, for whom ecstasy and despair soon became just words once read in novels?"



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