HelloKatieO’s #CBR4 Review 40: The Sense of an Ending by Julian Barnes

The Sense of an Ending is a story about memory. The book has a simple premise: the narrator tells us about events that happened in his life roughly while they are happening. And then, many years later, while in his 60s, the narrator revisits those memories – adding in what he forgot, embellishing, and seeking out the truth about the gaps in his knowledge.

The idea of the book itself is fascinating. Memories really do change over time. Sometimes, as time goes on, you look back on certain events and re-imagine them happier. Or re-imagine them as more tragic. Or assign them a meaning or significance that only becomes apparent as you get older and you start to learn more about yourself.

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Funkyfacecat’s #CBR4 Review #07: The Sense of an Ending by Julian Barnes

It’s hard to write an interesting review about a book I found so profoundly uninteresting. I found that it says nothing about male friendship and obsession and pop culture that Nick Hornby hasn’t said better, it says nothing about sex and secrets and death and academia that Donna Tartt’s Secret History or David Lodge’s campus novels haven’t done more interestingly, and it says nothing about painful but funny adolescence that Sue Townsend’s Adrian Mole didn’t do more poignantly and funnily.

I was reading it on a plane journey with a friend of mine; they asked me what it was about. There are these four boys who are schoolfriends, I said, and one of them was really bright, and now they’ve all grown up, and one of them has received a mysterious letter and…My friend interrupted to guess both the mystery and the twist. “It couldn’t be that,” I said. “That would be too obvious.” An hour later, I realised to my dismay that actually, it was that obvious.

The Sense of an Ending by Julian Barnes was the Man Booker Prize winner this year, so I guess some folks liked it. And I can see why it’s the sort of book that would win that sort of prize- it’s literary, it’s witty in places (although it thinks its funnier than it is when describing male masturbation in detail several times), it dabbles in commentary on nostalgia and failure and the tricks memory plays, it has a mystery and a twist, it attempts to articulate the sense of a certain time and place in a certain version of England with wry panache. But I found it to be less than the sum of its parts; indeed, for me, its parts cancelled each other out, leaving nothing but a vague sense of malaise.

A-schaef’s #CBR4 Review #06: The Sense of an Ending by Julian Barnes

Buy this book. Read it. It’s short, it’s not tough to read, and it is absolutely god damn magnificent. I don’t think I’ve loved a book this much since the first time I read Never Let Me Go. It’s just beautiful, and absolutely deserving of the Man Booker Prize it was awarded.

The Sense of an Ending follows Tony Webster. In school, he and his two friends eventually adopt a new student named Adrian into their group. They grow up and they all ship out to different universities. Tony dates a pretty girl named Veronica, they all eventually lose touch with each other. Much later in his life, Tony finds all of these memories drudged up again in a strange encounter with his past.

Tony Webster is one of the most interesting narrators I can remember reading. He is unreliable, but not because he means to lie to the reader. The book is about the ways that memory can be ignored and shaped over the years, and we see his memories take shape and mature into what we can assume actually happened. He also has a desire to understand every moment, and it comes through sometimes when he’s successful. These occasional reminders of the pathos behind his actions force us to see it when he doesn’t point it out.

The supporting characters are few in this book. Almost all of the story happens between an integral 7 or 8 people, and we don’t learn a great deal about any of them. As an alternative to great exposition, these characters come through with a great vividness that works instead. It’s not that they’re shallow archetypes, they just make a swift and indelible mark and then, just as easily, leave the story. It makes for an interesting break from first-person narrators who have uncanny understanding of people’s lives. Tony doesn’t know the complete history of these people any more than you know every event of somebody you know.

All in all, this is a stunningly good book. If you have even the slightest interest in stories of this style, you would be doing yourself a great disservice by not reading it.