The Sense of an Ending: A Review

"I hate the way the British have of not being serious about being serious," says Adrian, a young man in Julian Barnes' Man Booker Prize winning novel "The Sense of an Ending." Barnes takes his character's criticism to heart and writes a serious story about time, history, memory and life. It is structured as an older man's reflections on his life with many quotable observations and a mystery.

The narrator is Tony, a comfortable retiree who has lived an unchallenged life of few successes and well tolerated failures. We first meet him in prep school with two friends and a newcomer, Adrian, who seems to the narrator as a cut above. They adolescently theorize and debate among themselves and with teachers about history ("History is that certainty produced at the point where the imperfections of memory meet the inadequacies of documentation") and Camus' musings on suicide and the assessed life. The friends separate, go to college, Tony has a restrained affair with Veronica and meets her family then breaks up with her. She takes up with Adrian who commits suicide. Eventually Tony marries Margaret (a woman with "clean edges"), they have a daughter, and the two eventually amicably divorce. Tony retires. Tony learns that Victoria's mother has died and has inexplicably left him money and Adrian's diary. Victoria, in possession of the diary, refuses to release it to him. The second half of the book concerns Tony's efforts to explain this strange bequest and Victoria's position.

The search for answers calls into question all of Tony's life, the events he experienced, his motives and the accuracy of his memories. "When we are young we invent different futures for ourselves, when we are old we invent different pasts for others." What evolves is a coming of age story in retrospect, a counterpoint to what has been revealed before.
In one of Tony's earlier observations he says adolescence was a "holding pen" from which he would be released into the adult life of "passion and change, ecstasy and despair." This never happens for him. He never matures into that intensity. Responsibility becomes safety, maturity cowardice.

Lack of desire, the failure to engage life does not make for a good protagonist and this short, well written story suffers from it. But this story is full of wisdom, not the least is history "isn't the lies of the victors..it's more the memories of the survivors, most of whom are neither victorious or defeated."