'Don’t think ill of me, remember me well. Tell people you were fond of me, that you loved me, that I wasn’t a bad guy. Even if, perhaps, none of this was the case.'
I’ve covered five of the six books on the 2011 Booker shortlist, and two of them already have dealt with the confessional impulse. In AD Miller’s Snowdrops, it is an impending marriage that provokes Nick Platt’s letter of penitence. Meanwhile in Esi Edugyan’s Half Blood Blues, Sid Griffiths is undeniably facing the penumbra of his twilight years when he is begrudgingly forced to re-evaluate his past. The Sense of an Ending, Julian Barnes’s latest offering, is another such book— leading me unavoidably to believe that perhaps some members of the judging panel have something sinister lurking in their pasts.
The sense of an Ending is a slim volume of only 149 short pages. And, as the title suggests, is akin to Half Blood Blues in that it’s a late life settling of affairs that motivates the book’s narrator, Tony Webster, to recount an episode from his youth. It is similar to Half Blood Blues however in more ways than just this. Unquestionably, the book’s overriding theme is the fallibility of memory.
It is a bequest of five hundred pounds from the barely known mother of an ex-girlfriend that initiates the events of The Sense of an Ending; a sum ‘bigger than nothing, not as big as something’. Further, Tony is inexplicably left a diary in the bequest belonging to a precocious school friend, Adrian Finn. Barnes deftly interweaves the attempts of the adult Tony to retrieve the diary from its withholder, Veronica — Tony’s ex, and Tony’s incomplete recollections of the young Adrian and the enigmatic Veronica.
Barnes’s stint as a Crime writer, under the pseudonym Pat Kavanagh, has no doubt benefited this book, as Tony’s fragmented memories are pieced together with well-judged sense of tension and anticipation. It is an intellectual mystery, and quite brilliant for it. Barnes flawlessly captures the paranoia of older age and the implicit fear of decline, as Tony constantly questions and seeks verification for his own imperfect recollections. As a narrator his voice is intelligent but ostensibly un-poetic; given to histrionic philosophising and affectation, he is pitiable and certainly dwarfed by Adrian’s intellectual presence.
Meanwhile, Veronica is aloof and calculating— both in memory and in the present. Her character is revealed in slithers; in the meagre secretions offered from Tony’s memories and in her later shrewdly guarded exchanges with Tony, which occur first by email and later in terse meetings held in the brasserie of Oxford Street branch of John Lewis.
Or that’s what I thought, anyway. But then I re-read the book…
I don’t normally have time to completely re-read the books that I review, but The Sense of an Ending underwent such a late stage transformation that I was pretty much forced to reconsider it in its entirety. It’s well worth the effort though, as it’s only with a second reading that you can truly realise the sheer complexity of the novel. I like to think of it as one of the those novels where you’re given two entirely different perspectives on a singular event— only in this case the view of the second person is aptly missing.
Instead, Barnes leaves it to the reader to intuit the limitations of the narrator and infer the other story. Freed from Tony's influence, a second reading allows everything to be rendered other way around. And you realise that the book is dripping with double meanings and alternative interpretations. Now, Veronica becomes beleaguered by Tony’s imperious and insensitive presence; her terseness at first shyness and later recalcitrant indifference— a consequence of pain inflicted. Likewise, Adrian’s loftiness seems to run less deep— a defensive veneer that masks his vulnerability.
Akin to Snowdrops and Half-Blood Blues, Tony’s lapses of memory in The Sense of an Ending are self-serving and selective. He seeks subjectively to bend the facts and subconsciously manipulate his own history in order to fulfil the universal human need for a moral self. Even his contrite moments come late, and only when faced by indisputable truths, as though remorse is the last recourse in maintaining that all-important moral self-image.
We aren’t supposed to feel duped though, or to dislike the narrator. His subjectivity is instead empathetic— forcing us to see ourselves in Tony and to question our own fallible recollections. I no longer suspect that certain members of Booker judging panel have an ominous secret, but rather that we all do. Intra-personal duplicity is all-pervasive and of all-time. But, perhaps, presciently so…
