By Julian Barnes, 2011
I picked this book up last week, shortly after hearing it had won the Booker prize. I didn’t have terribly high hopes for it, but I figured that, having won a major prize, it would at least provide an enjoyable break from the other book I’m working on right now, Ulysses, which is fun to read, but also thoroughly exhausting. And at only about 150 pages, Barnes’s novel is short enough to be gulped down whole, even by a hopelessly slow reader like myself.
Of the novel’s many concerns, memory is by far the most prominent. How does it work? When and why does it undermine or contradict itself? How does the process of weaving a story distort what little sense of objectivity there can be in memory? This last question, of course, points to the narrator’s motive in asking such questions in the first place: He is a knowingly unreliable storyteller contemplating his own duplicity. Yet, despite this elaboration on a classic device, we may be tempted to think that the unreliable narrator has been played out. From Ford’s narrator in The Good Soldier to Nabokov’s Humbert Humbert, we seem to have seen every possible variation of the deceitful, nostalgic, or revisionist narrator. But what we have—until now—lacked, and what Barnes provides in Tony Webster, is a narrator who really, truly understands the nuances and shortcomings inherent in the act of retrospectively spinning fragments into narrative.
I don’t want to give too much away, but it’s necessary to give a rough outline of the plot if I’m to continue talking about the rich intellectual fabric of this novel. Consciously or not, it takes its basic layout from Woolf’s To the Lighthouse: there are two larger sections that expand and zoom in on relatively short periods of time, separated by a much shorter, compressed section in which a great amount of time passes. In The Sense of an Ending, the first of these sections gives us the story of Webster’s youth, the story of that time when, as he puts it “we imagined ourselves as being kept in some kind of holding pen, waiting to be released into our lives.” In university, he gets a girlfriend, breaks up with her, and has sex with her (in that order). She starts seeing a close friend of his who’s always seemed just a little more intelligent and mature, and of course, he becomes delightfully melodramatic, writing a particularly nasty letter addressed to both of them. Webster then glosses over his entire adulthood—all 40 years of it, including an unsuccessful marriage, a child, and a grandchild—in a single page. In the final section of the novel, he writes about the process of making amends with his old friends, and coming to terms with his own nastiness.
In the first section (my favorite), Barnes achieves a tone that impresses me for both its exactness and its self-awareness. His technique, the way he knowingly and purposefully exaggerates the distorting effect of his narrator’s attempts to wrestle bald events into narrative, reminds me of the way an impressionist paints: not as an exact, uncompromising reproduction or mirror, but in a way that respects the facts while knowingly departing from them. The result is an elegant, sustained paraphrase of youth. But beyond any of this, the real reason this section is my favorite is that it’s the most angst-y and melodramatic—qualities that, at 23, I revel in.
The final section conceals and its last pages half-reveal a HUGE secret. If you’re clever enough and you’ve been paying enough attention, you’ll figure it out (eventually) and it will BLOW YOUR MIND. But until you do, it really is the most frustrating thing ever. Throughout this section, a character who I find extremely annoying and vindictive continually taunts Webster (and us) for just not getting it. “You still don’t get it. You never have and you never will. So stop even trying.” You really can’t help but feel her words are directed at you as well, making her all the more unlikable. But there’s nothing like a good challenge, and after thinking about it a few minutes, and maybe rereading a few passages, the secret tying this whole novel together becomes apparent.
