The Sense of an Ending

The Sense of an Ending by Julian Barnes
Published: 2011
Length: 150 pages

This is my first Julian Barnes novel, and I really enjoyed it. Beautifully written with an interesting plot, one that manages to turn the story on its head at the end without it feeling at all gimmicky or contrived.

If you’ll excuse a brief history lesson: most people didn’t experience ‘the Sixties’ until the Seventies. Which meant, logically, that most people in the Sixties were still experiencing the Fifties – or, in my case, bits of both decades side by side. Which made things rather confusing.

The first part of this follows a boy, Tony Webster, and his close friends in school and eventually on to university. They’re arrogant and consider themselves great intellectuals, and Tony eventually finds himself in his first real relationship with a bewildering and offbeat girl, Veronica. The second part of the novel has Tony as a middle-aged man revisiting a tragic event that occurred during that time and reconnecting, somewhat, with Veronica over it. This decidedly vague description, as I don’t want to reveal too much, may show a very simple storyline, but it’s full of intricacies, both in the actions of the characters and in Tony’s inner-dialogue.

What did I know of life. I who had 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 realised? 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?

My one complaint would be that Veronica was just frustratingly obtuse throughout the story when they both could have just had a simple conversation. At one point, an exasperated Veronica says “You don’t get it. You never did,” and looking back at that moment after finishing the novel, all I could think was yeah, no shit. There’s literally no reason he should have gotten ‘it’ from what you presented, the most obscure clues I’ve ever read. As adults, they were both still deeply flawed, but she was flawed in basically the same way as when she was in her twenties, which I just found irritating.

Still, it’s an excellent novel. I can see why it won the 2011 Man Booker Prize.