Review of Julian Barnes' "The Sense of an Ending"

[The above is mostly a reading of the text below, with an occasional aside thrown in for good measure as they strike me as relevant.  I welcome questions, comments, or concerns about the material contained in this video.]

I recently finished Barnes’ “A History of the World in 10 ½ Chapters,” and gave it a pretty glowing review. Its combination of clever playfulness and meditations on important questions was one I tend to find less frequently in contemporary fiction, and was therefore a welcome one. Just as in “A History of the World in 10 ½ Chapters,” the themes of memory and our relationship with it loom large, but here they are transmuted into a poignant story of personal revelation, not the latter’s illustration of the vast canvas of humanity. “The Sense of an Ending” retains Barnes’ humorous voice despite its subject, which could have easily let it devolve into a cheap, sentimental pity party.

The novel is told in two parts. The first introduces us to the narrator, Tony Webster, and his small circle of smart-alecky, pretentious friends in their last years before going off to university. They all think pretty highly of themselves (I guess that’s not too atypical of boys this age), but one among them – Adrian – really and truly does stand out. The other friends were too alike and immature to really stick out in my imagination. But Adrian’s interest in ideas, philosophy, and history even has his history teacher offering him his job one day if it wants it, and he wasn’t kidding. Adrian has such heightened moral scruples that he even writes a letter to Tony asking if it’s okay that he dates one of his ex-girlfriends, Veronica. Veronica, despite being a total passive-aggressive bitch who led Tony along on a string, was one of the few oases in an adolescence otherwise wholly unvisited by reciprocated love interests. Tony replies with a very sardonic, sarcastic, cutting letter in reply saying in effect, “Sure, but don’t mind my damaged goods.” 

After graduating from school, Adrian is accepted, to no one’s surprise, to Cambridge University. However, Adrian’s precocity turns out to be very much a mixed blessing; during their college years they lose touch, and Tony learns that Adrian has, apparently because of his unshakeable philosophical convictions, committed suicide. 

One day, Tony receives a letter from a solicitor informing him that Veronica’s mother has passed away, and that she wants to leave him Adrian’s diary. This re-opens a slew of old memories and associations that Tony may very well have wanted to leave untouched. After repeated attempts, he finally makes contact again with Veronica, who is still as conniving and cold as ever, even though we understand as the story wears on that she might have some small reason to be this way. In most reviews, I wouldn’t hesitate divulging even the most important parts of the book, but the unwinding of Tony’s memories come so quickly and are so important to the unfolding of the book that I would feel something would be lost to people who wanted to read it.

Thankfully, it won’t be divulging too much to say that this novel is about our complicated relationship with the past, how we come to understand and build that past, and how we must reconcile ourselves with it. A few people have noted that Tony seems to be self-pitying and his mistaken analyses of his friends. Of course, that’s Barnes’ point: wisdom and self-knowledge mean nothing, and might not even be possible, until we are blessed with the distinction between the promethean and the epimethean, before foresight and hindsight. The entire novel is about Tony slowly and painfully finding this out for himself.