The Sense of an Ending (Julian Barnes)

The Booker Prize for Fiction (or "The Man Booker Prize" as it's called these days) creates excitement and debate around the literary world like no other award. Over the years, it's been awarded to works of genius (Salman Rushdie's 'Midnight's Children' in 1981), works of excellence (Margaret Atwood's 'The Blind Assassin' in 2000), works of solid literary merit (Pat Barker's 'The Ghost Road' in 1995) and works which were merely good (Arundhati Roy's 'The God of Small Things' in 1997). Interestingly enough, I hadn't read a Booker winner since 2001, when Peter Carey secured the prize with 'The True History of the Kelly Gang'. None of the winners since then had piqued my interest enough to pick them up. I've perused the displays of Booker nominees in the bookshops, sure, but not bit the bullet. So it was a pleasant surprise to pick up 'The Sense of an Ending' in Waterstone's back in October and have my interest well and truly piqued. Registering my interest, my girlfriend put this under our Christmas tree for me, and here we are.

A tightly structured and beautifully written little novella, 'The Sense of an Ending' is predicated on the fact that our memories and recollections can in fact be trumped by actual historical documents, which may place ourselves in a less favourable light. The novella asks the very pertinent question "what is history?". Is it the song of the victor or the self-delusion of the defeated, or indeed both? Is there such a thing as history if we cannot understand the history of the historian? What kind of power does the distorting hand of time hold over us and can we ever come to terms with this? These philosophical musings are masterfully woven into Barnes' plot, so we become painfully aware of our own failings, just as the narrator and protagonist, Tony Webster, becomes painfully aware of his. It's an unsettling, dark and nasty little tale, just as most of the best books tend to be, at least in my view.

The book begins in a modest public day school in London in the early 1960s, where three friends- the narrator, Tony Webster and his close friends Colin and Alex  are joined for the final year of school by the enigmatic and intelligent Adrian Finn. Together, the boys pretentiously float around the sixth form, and like all cliques, revel in their superiority over their peers. When they are separated by university, Tony meets a girl, Veronica Ford, who turns out to be something of a manipulative succubus, and after a visit to her family one summer turns the relationship sour, she ultimately leaves him for Adrian. Infuriated, Tony writes them both (what he thinks) is a strongly worded but broadly magnanimous goodbye letter and cuts them both out of his life. We then get a brief run down of what happened to Tony during his adult life, including the news, in his early twenties, that Adrian had committed suicide. This is only half the story. It is the other half of the story that is really compelling. A letter arrives from the solicitor of Veronica's recently deceased mother. And here, the tragedy begins.

I enjoyed this book a tremendous amount, and finished it in a mere day. The prose style is musical, stark and haunting, and Barnes has a keen eye for what sort of things rise from our past to trouble our psyches.I found all of the characters entrirely believable and Tony's narrative voice is controlled and painfully self-aware. Motifs recur and rear their heads like hydra, and certain phrases stick with you, bore into you. This is real fiction, ladies and gentlemen, and it's the most lurid compliment I could pay this book when I say that it reminded me most of Donna Tartt's 'The Secret History' and Margaret Atwood's 'The Blind Assassin', two books which also take a compellingly bleak look at the past lives of their narrators. I can unreservedly say that last year, the Booker judges chose an absolute humdinger. How it stands up to history remains to be seen, but as of right now, I think this is a book destined for future greatness.