It’s been a couple of days now since I finished The Sense of an Ending by Julian Barnes. I was drawn into the novel fairly early, and my attention was held from the beginning to the end, to the point that I deliberately forced myself to take a break at the end of Part One before beginning Part Two. The first thing I thought when I finished this book was “Wow.” Not sure that I can be more eloquent now, two days later, than when I finished reading it, but I’ll give it the old college try.
This book is about…well, in some ways that is an easy question to answer and in some ways it’s a hard question to answer. It’s about Time. Memory. History. The history of our lives and how memory and time changes the way that history is viewed and known and understood, how the history of our lives as well as the lives of others are written and re-written, over and over again. That even when we think we have the history of our lives correct, it may still be incorrect, or incomplete. On one level, the novel is asking how much of history is fiction, and how much of it is truth?
I’m not sure though that this answers the question of what this book is about. Maybe I have to resort to identifying some of the plot. Our narrator is Tony Webster, and he tells the story of his life—or at least, a part of his life. He begins in Part One by telling us about his two childhood mates (Colin, and honestly, I can’t remember the second one’s name right now, and I don’t have the book beside me to look up his name!) and the third of his mates who arrives on the scene much later but is absorbed into their little group—Adrian. The three boys are instantly taken with Adrian—he seems to be the philosopher, the one who is much more serious about school, but also the one who has a bit of mystery, the one whose thoughts and mind are somewhat impenetrable to the rest of the boys. While the boys are at school, one of their classmates commits suicide, and the reason that he commits suicide as well as the question of how much anyone can know of his reasons for doing so (as Adrian points out, no biographical history of the boy’s life can be complete without a direct account from the boy himself, that any biography of his life would be subject to some level of conjecture and speculation that could prove to be accurate or inaccurate) becomes a debate among the boys. This event—and the reactions to it—set the stage for reading the events that follow in the novel. Which I won’t spoil here. What is important is that as Tony, from his 60s, looks back upon those events as a result of a bequest made to him by a woman he barely knows, he writes and rewrites his own history even as he questions the accuracy of his memory and his own speculations and conjectures that fill the holes and blanks in his own memory and his knowledge of specific events.
I read this book in one sitting, for multiple reasons. Now that the spring semester has begun, the time I have to read for leisure is much less than I would probably like. But I also read this book in one sitting because I had to know what happened. I had to see how the mystery would unravel. Oftentimes, I read to get to the end and to be able to say that I’m done with a particular book, but with this novel, I kept reading because I wanted to and because I felt almost compelled to. I didn’t want to put this book down. Also, as someone who teaches literature, I could really appreciate the way that this novel is structured and the way it is written. And, Barnes does something that doesn’t always work out well but certainly works here (and I was reminded of the way it works in The God of Small Things by Arundhati Roy)—he uses repetition in order to heighten the intensity and importance of what is being said (or thought) as well as intensify the impact the words (or the memory of the words) have upon Tony as the narrator. I think it is so beautifully written and yet for me there is also something that is haunting about the words and the reflections and realizations Tony makes, not just about the events that have taken place but about himself and about human nature in general. I would definitely recommend this book because it’s one of those books that evoked a strong emotional response from me, which isn’t necessarily an easy thing to do. When I finished this book I thought “This is the best book I’ve read all year” and then I had to remind myself it was only January. So I changed my response to “this is the best book I’ve read in a while.” When rating it, I gave it 5 out of 5 stars, and I haven’t done that in a really, really long time. I’m interested to see what other people I know think about this book, so if you’re looking for something to read, definitely pick it up. I have heard people say that you have different reactions to a book depending upon where you are in life when you read it. I completely believe that this is true. So I wonder if other people will have the same reaction or a complete opposite reaction than I did, and if my response to the novel says more about where I am in life than the book itself.
