Though it is frequently marred by both bias and error, memory is the primary tool by which we navigate our lives. After all, without it, we would not know ourselves, what we've endured in the past, what we stand for in the present, and what we wish to accomplish in the future. Life's narrative does not exist without it. And so its deep and systemic flaws can and do profoundly impact and reshape our lives. Though The Sense of an Ending harbors mystery and philosophy, expresses revenge and regret, it is, at root, a rumination and an expose of memory and the ways in which it is a malleable record of what we consider a concrete past.
Tony Webster is an aging Englishman largely content with his life. Though he's been divorced now for nearly 20 years, he is on amicable terms with both his ex-wife and his grown-up daughter who now has children of her own. He has long since put to rest any hopes or aspirations of being extraordinary. And so, when a letter arrives from the mother (Sarah) of his adolescent girlfriend (Veronica), bequeathing him $500 and the diary of a high school friend who committed suicide some 30 years earlier, Tony is stirred from his settled life to both make sense of this puzzling development and to delve into his past to revisit the events which lead to it.
While Tony reaches out to the difficult and uncooperative Veronica to ask that she hand over the diary, he recounts the story of his life, ruminating on the desires and the vicissitudes of his ordinary adolescence. He details how, in his schoolboy years, he and his friends added Adrian, an intelligent boy and the author of the diary, to their clique. Though Adrian dates Veronica just after she and tony break up, and though he commits suicide a short time later, Tony sustains his appreciation for Adrian, envying both his clarity of his thought and the force of his moral vision. Now, decades have come and gone, careers forged and retired from, families raised and released into the world. And Veronica has returned to both bemuse and trouble him. For she refuses to cooperate with her mother's request and Tony must find out why if he is to understand what happened, to himself, to Adrian and to Veronica, all those years ago.
The winner of the 2011 Man Booker Prize, this slim novel from Mr. Barnes, a British author of more than a dozen works of fiction, is, in the main, a reflection upon the fallibility of memory. Though Tony's geniality entices us to like him, to feel sympathy for him, and to believe his account of events which depict him as having been a gentleman to Veronica, we swiftly learn that Tony's version of events cannot be trusted. As the novel unfolds, the reader and Tony together are presented with proof that Tony was far from accepting of Adrian and Veronica's relationship, that, in fact, he did his best to poison it by revealing to Adrian his suspicions about Veronica and her odd family, and that his harshness may well have contributed to the challenges both friends later on. This revelation forces Tony to re-evaluate his life and causes the reader to re-evaluate Tony, feeding every new fact he tells us through the lens of suspicion and doubt.
Though I can understand why The Sense of an Ending has earned its acclaim -- rarely has the Unreliable Narrator been used more skillfully and to profounder effect than it has been here --, the work is less than satisfying. Despite many hints, from the author and from Tony, we learn next to nothing about the lives of Veronica and Adrian, characters vital to the story's plot. What's more, the author is elss than convincing with the novel's central conceit, that a settled Tony would lift himself out of his comfortable retirement to pursue a 0-year-old mystery. Yes, most novels rely upon conceits to drive the core drama, but this one is surprisingly clumsy for a novel of such repute. When stacked up against prior winners of the prize, The Sense of an Ending does not measure up to works like Wolf Hall or The God of Small Things, pieces which both moved and educated. For all its supreme cleverness, this is, in the end, a story about a bored Englishman,his unspectacular life and his glitchy memory. Well-done, yes, but revelatory or provocative? Sadly, no. (3/5 Stars)
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