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The Sense of an Ending Julian Barnes 9780224094153 Books

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The Sense of an Ending Julian Barnes 9780224094153 Books

I’ve spent a lot of time, probably more than is healthy, staring at Julian Barnes’s author photo on the back cover of his Man Booker Prize winning novel, “The Sense of an Ending.” I’m obsessed by his penetrating stare into my eyes that clearly says, “You didn’t understand a thing I said, did you, Goober?” No. No, I didn’t.

This book explores Tony Webster, his friends, and his meeting with Adrian Finn at school. They were all sex-crazed, book obsessed, and gawky as they traded off-color jokes, rumors, witty gossip, and wanking experiences. Adrian’s life turned to tragedy and they all moved on, trying to forget. Tony, now middle-aged, has a career, is once-divorced, seems to get along with ex-wife and daughter, and certainly has no desire to hurt anyone. But a lawyer’s letter, and an unexpected bequeathment that seems to be impossible to obtain, throws up a fog of past experiences and reflections that create hazy moments for me.

So here we have a prize-winning writer, author of several well-received books, with, in my mind, an obsession for turning phrases into indecipherable contemplation. Many words have been used to describe Barnes’s writing. Precise, dexterous, disturbing, insightful, elegiac, and provocative are just a few. His mother, deeming him as having too much imagination, complained that his first book was a “bombardment” of filth. Perhaps mother knows best.

I did not find this chronicle on getting old, struggling with memories, and being plagued with regret an easy or enjoyable read. So I crawl back to the cabbage patch and await the remarks from my erudite fellow reading club members to help me make some sense of it all.

Schuyler T Wallace
Author of TIN LIZARD TALES


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The Sense of an Ending Julian Barnes 9780224094153 Books Reviews

The prose is written in a meditative style and as a reader you are included in the internal debates of the narrator. This makes for absorbing reading. The anti-hero, protagonist, Tony Webster is a sort of everyman character - nothing exceptional, living an ordinary life, as it were creaking his way to the crematorium. A lawyer's letter forces him to re-engage with his past and consider errors of judgement that had far-reaching consequences particularly for his developing a reclusive character, unwilling to expose himself to unnecessary hurt. The novel forces us to reconsider our pasts and how our selective memories can trick us into a false sense of complacency.As a history teacher I found the passages that consider history, particularly in the lessons that Tony remembers from his schooldays, a stimulating perspective on our personal histories and how the past is another country. But Julian Barnes is saying the past is a country that should be revisited if we are to find any meaning in our lives especially when we come to the end of our lives so that we can make sense of the ending.
I recently read Julian Barnes’ The Sense of an Ending (Vintage International, 2012), and when I finished it, I did something I have never done before I immediately turned back to the first page and started over again. I didn’t do this because I so greatly enjoyed the book, exactly. It’s not exactly an enjoyable book, at least not in the sense that some old favorite is enjoyable, the kind of old favorite you read over and over again like comfort food, escaping reality for a few hours to return to a world as familiar as reality, but a lot more pleasant and comfortable. It’s not that kind of book.
Instead, it is intensely compelling and disturbing, a thought-provoking book that demands you reflect on your own life, your own past, your own memories.
The book is divided into two parts. That’s the kind of meaningless piece of information that normally alerts the reader of a review that the reviewer has nothing meaningful to say, but it is important here because the first part is a more or less straight forward account of a sequence of events in the narrator’s youth as he remembers them. The second part, almost twice as long as the first, is the narrator’s attempt to unravel the skein of memory and to reconcile reality both with memory and with what Faulkner once called “the irrevocable might-have-been.” And therein lies the book’s genius.
Memory is tenuous and all too unreliable, sometimes even recent memory. It is the secular reason why I don’t believe in the death penalty (I also have religious objections) it is all too easy for memory to deceive us, to trick us into believing A when it was really B all along. I was once involved in a criminal police investigation and asked to give certain information. When it came to describing the suspect’s car, I answered with great certainty that it was brand new and bright red. I remember the blank looks on officers’ faces. The suspect’s car was brand new and bright blue. I had seen it, I had seen it clearly. I had even stood looking at it for several minutes, but because it was a new model, magazines were filled with ads, and television commercials ran on every network, showing bright red models and memory had conflated the two in my mind.
In the same way, one of the key points in The Sense of an Ending hinges on a letter which the narrator remembers one way in Part One, but which we—and he—discover in Part Two to have been very different than his memory would have it. (The phrasing of that sentence should give you a clue to what the reality was.)
The letter is pivotal because the narrator believes it to have set off a sequence of events he deeply regrets, and he is forced to reexamine his own story of himself. And that is what Barnes is asking us to do, to determine if the history of our lives is accurate, or if we have made convenient cuts and edits, or perhaps added a few cunning and subtle embellishments over the years, to diminish this painful reality here or that uncomfortable truth over there. We all long to be a little better than we are, and the stories of our lives, the stories we tell ourselves and others, reflect that longing, consciously or unconsciously.
In Atonement, Ian McEwan’s central character wants desperately to undo something she did as a child, something she too deeply regrets, and that novel ends with recognition of the futility of trying to change the past. We do terrible things, sometimes, intentionally or unintentionally, and we must learn to live with the consequences of those mistakes. Julian Barnes is also writing about living with consequences, about living with ourselves as we really are, and his narrator, like the narrator of Atonement, finally accepts that. But unlike the narrator of Atonement, Barnes’ narrator does not deliberately create a lie to satisfy his longing, unless you consider pushing the past aside—storing it in an unused closet of the mind—a kind of lie. Instead, his encounter with the reality of the past is thrust upon him and he must slowly come to grips with what really was, some of which may have been partially his own doing, some of which was not.
As long as I’m comparing the two novels, I find Ian McEwan’s writing to be much more emotionally engaging than Julian Barnes’. I read somewhere once that Barnes’ brother is a philosopher, and I can readily believe it because that kind of detached, cerebral quality permeates everything I have read by Barnes, including The Sense of an Ending. That is not to be construed as praise I find the absence of emotional engagement and sensory detail off-putting, though I have no way of knowing if that is intentional on the author’s part or not. As my friend Dan Bronson (Confessions of a Hollywood Nobody) likes to say about writing (quoting Herman Melville’s letter to Nathaniel Hawthorn discussing writing) “I stand for the heart. To the dogs with the head! I had rather be a fool with a heart than Jupiter Olympus with his head.” Atonement is packed with such empathetic characters, including the little girl who ruins the lives around her, that you ache for them all. The Sense of an Ending has characters whose personalities are so reserved as to make them almost unknowable, and whose motivations and emotions we never fully understand, while the narrator, Tony, is completely emotionless in a frightfully British, stiff upper lip sort of way, so that at the end, when a bombshell is set off in what he thinks he understands about his life and actions and the memories of those two things, he simply ruminates on the advantages of thin chips (French fries) over fat ones. That’s not the best way to stir emotions in a reader either.
And yet… I have never before read a book straight through twice in a row, so clearly something in me was engaged, perhaps not by my heartstrings, but engaged nonetheless.
I’ve spent a lot of time, probably more than is healthy, staring at Julian Barnes’s author photo on the back cover of his Man Booker Prize winning novel, “The Sense of an Ending.” I’m obsessed by his penetrating stare into my eyes that clearly says, “You didn’t understand a thing I said, did you, Goober?” No. No, I didn’t.

This book explores Tony Webster, his friends, and his meeting with Adrian Finn at school. They were all sex-crazed, book obsessed, and gawky as they traded off-color jokes, rumors, witty gossip, and wanking experiences. Adrian’s life turned to tragedy and they all moved on, trying to forget. Tony, now middle-aged, has a career, is once-divorced, seems to get along with ex-wife and daughter, and certainly has no desire to hurt anyone. But a lawyer’s letter, and an unexpected bequeathment that seems to be impossible to obtain, throws up a fog of past experiences and reflections that create hazy moments for me.

So here we have a prize-winning writer, author of several well-received books, with, in my mind, an obsession for turning phrases into indecipherable contemplation. Many words have been used to describe Barnes’s writing. Precise, dexterous, disturbing, insightful, elegiac, and provocative are just a few. His mother, deeming him as having too much imagination, complained that his first book was a “bombardment” of filth. Perhaps mother knows best.

I did not find this chronicle on getting old, struggling with memories, and being plagued with regret an easy or enjoyable read. So I crawl back to the cabbage patch and await the remarks from my erudite fellow reading club members to help me make some sense of it all.

Schuyler T Wallace
Author of TIN LIZARD TALES