Sense of an Ending

As I have remarked previously, I seldom read current or contemporary fiction. I'm not sure why this is, except that I have only a limited amount of time and attention, and such as I have I seem to have given over to a fairly serious study of British culture in the first half of the twentieth century. But from time to time something will catch my attention, e.g., William Boyd's Any Human Heart and Nat Tate, and Mark Danielewski's House of Leaves. Recently, my attention was grabbed by reviews of Julian Barnes' The Sense of an Ending, which won the 2011 Man Booker Prize. I remembered really enjoying Flaubert's Parrot, which was the first of his novels short-listed for the Booker Prize, but that was some time ago, and I haven't been very faithful since. Still, the reviews made me want to try this one, and at just a little over 160 pages, I figured I could get it in without really interrupting my regular reading program.

I'm glad I did. It's a very entertaining little book. There's much more to it than one might expect from such a relatively short work. Barnes is a masterful writer. By that I mean he knows how to make all the elements of the book work well together so that the reader is both entertained and engaged. This is one that deserves a prize, and also deserves to be studied by younger would-be authors who want to discover some of the secrets of good fiction writing. The book is divided into two unequal parts. The first part, which is only about 60 pages, could stand alone as a complete work of short fiction. But in this case it also serves as the set up for the second part of the story, which complicates and deepens our understanding of the book's small but very well-drawn cast of characters.

In the first part, apparently a rather typical coming of age story narrated by Tony Webster, we learn about a group of male friends of varying degrees of sensitivity as they move from school to young adulthood. One friend, the newcomer Adrian Finn, is a focal point for the group, and especially for Tony. Adrian is popular with his friends as well as his teachers, in spite of or because of his brilliance and sensitivity and penetrating wit. But later, when Tony discovers that Adrian has been seeing his former girl friend, a girl Tony has already chosen to break with, he feels a sense of betrayal and lashes out at both. More complications follow, but as this first section of the book comes to an end, we learn that Tony has now married, had a daughter, divorced, retired to a settled existence, and become one of the many who live into their mature years, "neither victorious nor defeated," as he puts it.

Or so he thinks, until he gets a mysterious letter from a solicitor with an unexpected bequest that turns his world completely upside down and gives Barnes the opportunity to show what marvelous things can be accomplished by means of the well-known trick of the unreliable narrator. The final two thirds of this little book are masterfully written. I could not put the book down until I had finished, and even then I wanted to go back over what I had read to test my own understanding of what has transpired. What I found particularly engaging was the way that Barnes drew me into Tony's view of the world. He truly is a modern everyman, who exhibits such a clear view of his own life and his place in the current world order that I found myself again and again agreeing with his judgments.

I can't imagine how someone younger might respond to this little book. But I was thoroughly absorbed and taken in by it. It's one of those stories that will stay with you, and I bet it would be a great one for a book club, especially of sixty somethings who want to take on a story about how it feels to be one of us just now. By the end of the second part Tony Webster, who was so self-satisfied at the conclusion of part one, is now observing: "There is accumulation. There is responsibility. And beyond these, there is unrest. There is great unrest." It's a good book.