Julian Barnes
About two weeks ago I ordered The Sense of an Ending by Julian Barnes. I figured that he won the 2011 Man Booker Prize with it, so it must be worth a read.
The Sense of an Ending is only 160 pages short. It might have had something to do with me, but I thought it was a fairly easy read, too. I finished reading it in one evening.
There is this middle-aged guy, Anthony “Tony” Webster, who is divorced but still has a good relationship with his ex-wife. He reminisces about his life in school and his friends, Colin, Alex and Adrian. One day he gets a letter from a lawyer indicating that someone (the mother of an old girlfriend) put him in her will and left him a document. This document turns out to be the diary of an old school friend, Adrian Finn. How did the mother of his former girlfriend end up with Adrian’s diary and why did she leave it to Tony? While figuring this out, he is confronted with the fact that our memories aren’t always based on what truly happened. This is how the story starts:
I remember, in no particular order:
- a shiny inner wrist;
- steam rising from a wet sink as a hot frying pan is laughingly tossed into it;
- gouts of sperm circling a plughole, before being sluiced down the full length of a tall house;
- a river rushing nonsensically upstream, its wave and wash lit by half a dozen chasing torchbeams;
- another river, broad and grey, the direction of its flow disguised by a stiff wind exciting the surface;
- bathwater long gone cold behind a locked door.
This last isn’t something I actually saw, but what you end up remembering isn’t always the same as you have witnessed.
In the beginning, when Tony revisits his school days, The Sense of an Ending reads like a Bildungsroman. When we come to part two, however, it gets the sense of a mystery novel in which the reader – together with Tony – tries to figure out what’s going on with Adrian’s diary. The novel is sometimes funny, sometimes sad and sometimes enthralling.
Some months ago, some of my fellow students of the final year of secondary school were interviewed for a free newspaper ten years after graduation. Of course I read the article and was surprised to learn how different the same circumstances can be perceived by different people. The Sense of an Ending tells its readers just that.
