Julian Barnes - The Sense of an Ending

First published on 7 Aug 2011. Updated on 8 Aug 2011.

They’re also both beautifully written, but then that’s something of a given. While Barnes has never boasted the flashiness of contemporaries like Martis Amis or Salman Rushdie, every time I read one of his books I’m reminded of his marvellous control of language and his exquisite sense of pacing – the latter of which is particularly important here.

 

It’s also tempting to read an autobiographical angle since life has caught up with Barnes’s writing: he’s now 65 years old, he’s a widower himself (since the 2008 death of his wife, the literary agent Pat Cavanagh), and there’s a certain exhaustion in the character of Tony Webster that feels to have been drawn from experience, compared with the more energetic character of amateur Flaubert scholar Geoffrey Braithwaite, created when Barnes was in his thirties. However, this line of thinking seems better suited to an undergraduate essay than a review (“The figure of the undemonstrative Englishman haunted by the romantic failures of his past is a recurring motif in the works of Julian Barnes. Discuss.”) and The Sense of an Ending is a strong enough title to stand alone.

 

Tony Webster and his two lifelong friends meet the brilliant Adrian Finn in high school and become close friends, secure in their intellectual superiority over their classmates – a fact made clear when one of the less-smart boys scandalises the school by committing suicide after knocking up his girlfriend. Things change for the quartet in their university days as distance takes its toll, while Webster has a brief but defining relationship with the forthright Veronica Ford, who later takes up with Adrian – who subsequently commits suicide himself, for reasons that are presumed high-minded and philosophical, if somewhat opaque. A lifetime later, with a failed marriage and a daughter behind him, Webster is remembered in the will of Veronica’s mother, mysteriously bequeathing him Adrian’s diary. And thus are old wounds opened, with the difference between the past we have and the past we remember laid out in near-surgical detail.

 

It’s a strange, slight story given weight by Barnes’ exceptional writing – a description which could equally well apply to his near-thriller Before She Met Me – and at 150 pages, it's barely more than a novella. Perhaps it’s because his rhythms are as familiar as an old friend that The Sense of an Ending didn’t demand my attention the way that his best writing has done in the past (I’d recommend Flaubert’s Parrot, A History of the World in 10 ½ Chapters and/or Talking it Over as the finest examples of his craft, myself), but a solid Barnes book is still head and shoulders above the best efforts of most contemporary fiction writers.