TITLE: The Sense of an Ending
AUTHOR: Julian Barnes
PUBLISHER: Random House (1 August 2011)
ISBN: 978 0 2240 9415 3 PRICE: A$29.95 (hardback) 150 pages.
Reviewed by Ann Skea (ann@skea.com).
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"some approximate memories, which time has deformed into certainties",
that's how Barnes's narrator, Tony Webster, describes this exploration
of his past. He begins with schooldays, because, "that's where it all
began". And in his memory he re-creates the friendships, the teenage
ambitions and uncertainties, a youthful love affair, a marriage and an
amicable divorce, all culminating in a comfortable, reasonably active
retirement. It is an ordinary story of an ordinary man, until a lawyer's
letter arrives to disturb his complacency.
Barnes is very good at capturing what it is like to be a bright boy at
school testing a growing awareness of the world in interactions with
friends and school masters. Tony and his good friends, Colin and Alex,
share this experience. The inclusion of Adrian, clever and more serious,
in their group changes the dynamics subtly but the friendships last
until university, careers and marriages draw them apart. It is Adrian,
however, who marries Tony's first serious girl-friend; and it is Adrian
who commits suicide at the age of twenty-two, and who, years later,
precipitates Tony's self-examination.
For some reason, Barnes divides this book into two. The first part,
which is lively and youthful, ends with Tony in retirement looking back
on the memories of a survivor. For a paragraph or two in the second
part, I expected a different narrator with a different perspective on
the past. But, no, it is still Tony, although he sounds more subdued,
older and more orientated to the present. In part two he is less sure of
himself, reliant on the views and advice of his former wife, and more
self-deceiving. He is still relying on memory to recount events but it
is much more recent memory, disturbed by his obsession with obtaining
Adrian's diary, which has unexpectedly and bizarrely been left to him by
Adrian's mother-in-law. It is easy to lose patience with Tony in this
second half, and the delaying tactics of the author are more obvious as
we are led towards a revelation which will make us, the readers,
re-assess our understanding of Tony's story; just as it made him
re-assess his memory of his own past.
"What you end up remembering isn't always the same as what you have
witnessed", Tony says at the start of this book. But can you be blamed
for a chain of events which began with something you did witness -
something you did and then forgot about?
"Towards the end of your life", says Tony, "You are allowed a long
moment of pause, time enough to ask the question: what else have I done
wrong?". It is an interesting question but one which few of us have to
face in quite the way Tony did.
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Copyright © Ann Skea 2011
Website and Ted Hughes pages:
http://ann.skea.com/
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