Book Review: “The Sense of an Ending” by Julian Barnes
A self-reflecting narrator, who prods as deeply into the lives of his readers as his own, writes genuinely—as a mirror for reality. In The Sense of an Ending, Julian Barnes constructs such a mirror. And through the course of his brief novel, does not let his reader look away.
Barnes’ narrator and protagonist is Tony Webster, a middle aged divorcee who would like to be, and seem to onlookers, comfortable in the rhythm and unfolding of his life. But the steadiness he has strained to acquire is disturbed when he receives a notice that he has been willed two curious items from a Mrs. Sarah Ford (deceased), the mother of a girlfriend he dated for one year during university.
The unexpected, odd inheritance prompts Tony to look back upon his life, while simultaneously pursuing an explanation for his place in the will. He reflects on events in his youth, his own history, his rewriting and selective forgetting of parts of that history, and the nature of memory—the dissonance between what is catalogued in the mind and the reality of what occurred.
Barnes works through the themes of memory, nostalgia, and time with the same wavering self-doubt you and I do when analyzing the most important and intimate events of our lives. Tony’s memory is our memory: a patchwork, incomplete, yet beautiful in its own right. And his regrets are equally relatable: unchangeable and sometimes with consequences all too apparent.
The story itself is engrossing but Barnes as a veteran novelist also wastes no words. He places his readers; he does not drag them along. At the close of the first section of the book he writes, “History isn’t the lies of the victors, as I once glibly assured Old Joe Hunt; I know that now. It’s more the memories of the survivors, most of whom are neither victorious nor defeated.” And when Tony is recalling a memory of his old girlfriend, Barnes weaves a pleasant and alluring paragraph: “Her father drove a Humber Super Snipe. Cars don’t have names like that any more, do they? I drive a Volkswagen Polo. But Humber Super Snipe – those were words that eased off the tongue as smoothly as ‘the Father, the Son and the Holy Ghost’.”
At 150 pages, The Sense of an Ending is not a daunting read, but it contains an involved, intimate story worthy of both its recent Booker Prize win and your attention. If you have time, give it a read during the upcoming break from classes.
Michael Biornstad
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