This 2011 work by Julian Barnes (nicely read in my audio-edition by Richard Morant) is only short -- it's more a novella than a novel -- but I've spent a lot of time with it (even tracking down the text to re-read), because it's disproportionately intriguing. I can see why it won the Booker Prize that year.

Our narrator is Anthony (Tony) Webster. Very early on, he tells us about a school history course. It sounds like a very productive intellectual endeavour. At one point, as recalled by Tony, new boy Adrian Finn comments: "There is one line of thought, according to which all you can truly say of any historical event ... is that 'something happened'." In a later lesson, Adrian develops this thought further: "That's one of the central problems of history, isn't it, sir? The question of subjective versus objective interpretation, the fact that we need to know the history of the historian in order to understand the version that is being put in front of us."

And in their final history class of the year, Adrian quotes (fictional) French historian Patrick Lagrange: "History is that certainty produced at the point where the imperfections of memory meet the inadequacies of documentation." He goes on to illustrate his point by referring to a recent tragic suicide at the school (of a boy who apparently killed himself because he had made his girlfriend pregnant). Adrian argues that we actually know very little about even such a recent event: "So how might anyone write Robson's story in fifty years' time, when his parents are dead and his girlfriend has disappeared and doesn't want to remember him anyway? You see the problem, sir?"

Mr Hunt, the history teacher, points out that there would be documents available for any potential future historian -- a coroner's report, a diary, letters -- and as long as the research didn't take place too far hence, there would be people to interview. True, the subject himself can no longer offer his version of events. "But equally," says Joe Hunt, "historians need to treat a participant's own explanation of events with a certain scepticism. It is often the statement made with an eye to the future that is the most suspect."

The preternaturally perspicacious Adrian also addresses the question of responsibility. "Isn't the whole business of ascribing responsibility a kind of cop-out?" he asks. "We want to blame an individual so that everyone else is exculpated. Or we blame a historical process as a way of exonerating individuals. Or it's anarchic chaos, with the same consequence. It seems to me that there is -- was -- a chain of individual responsibilities, all of which were necessary, but not so long a chain that everybody can simply blame everyone else."

Recalling these conversations, Tony adds a qualification: "Was this their exact exchange? Almost certainly not. Still, it is my best memory of their exchange." He frequently reiterates that what he is telling us is his reading at this point of what happened in the past -- or, more accurately, his memory at this point of the way he read events at the time they were happening.

I've quoted these passages at length, because the rest of the book is a set of variations on the themes of history, memory, and responsibility. What happened in the past? How do we know? Who is telling any particular story, and what axe do they have to grind? To what extent can we trust our memory, especially when we're looking back across a few decades? How do we know what we are responsible for, and how do we assume that responsibility? What do we do with memories that make us ashamed?


I have no pictures of the Severn Bore, which becomes a pivotal memory, or of Bristol, where Tony and Veronica studied. But Westonbirt (pics from 1988) is not far from Bristol, and Westbury Court Garden (pics from 1989) is right by the Severn

The first part of the book seems conventional. Overly so, you start to think. Another gauche young man, struggling with relationships and his place in the world: Tony meets Veronica Ford; meets her parents and brother; nothing quite works out. He feels bitter towards her, hard done by. Nicely rendered, I thought, but I feel I've been here before.

Then we shift gears, and more and more you come to question Tony's account of things.

While we're still in the trusting phase -- because Tony's so honest about his recollections and their limitations that he wouldn't be leading us down the garden path, would he? -- Tony has this to say about psychological "damage": "Some admit the damage, and try to mitigate it; some spend their lives trying to help others who are damaged; and there are those whose main concern is to avoid further damage to themselves, at whatever cost. And those are the ones who are ruthless, and the ones to be careful of." By the end of the book, you're really questioning who is in which category...

But first, back to the narrative. Veronica, her relationship with Tony having reached a dead end, starts to go out with Adrian. Rather quaintly, Adrian contacts his old friend, asking whether this is OK. Tony -- or so he tells us -- dashes off a flippant postcard telling him not to worry, and follows up with a more sober but still fairly harmless missive, urging Adrian to be prudent (because he thinks Veronica has at some point suffered "damage"), and suggesting he have a private word with Sarah, her mother.

Tony finishes college, and spends some time in the United States. On his return, he learns that Adrian has committed suicide.



The next few decades are dramatically telescoped. Tony lives his life, in unspectacular fashion, like most of us ("we muddle along, we let life happen to us, we gradually build up a store of memories...") He marries, has a daughter, divorces but remains on good terms with his ex-wife, retires. Barnes whizzes through all that very briefly, while nevertheless managing to conjure up a life that's not particularly unhappy, but fairly mundane and mediocre: "There was a moment in my late twenties when I admitted that my adventurousness had long since petered out. I would never do those things adolescence had dreamt about. Instead, I mowed my lawn, I took holidays, I had my life."

Veronica has long been pushed into the back of his mind. At first he hadn't even told his wife, Margaret, about this previous relationship, and he admits that when he finally did broach the subject, "I'd laid it on a bit, made myself sound more of a dupe, and Veronica more unstable than she'd been". His wife (now ex-wife) had taken to referring to the former girlfriend as "the fruitcake".

It's the death of Sarah, Veronica's mother, and her unexpected bequest to Tony (GBP 500 and Adrian's diary...), that brings Veronica back into the picture (because she's the one who currently has the diary). Tony badgers her for it, and eventually succeeds in setting up a series of meetings.

She doesn't give him the diary (claiming she has burnt it), but she gives him a copy of a few tantalizing pages (which end with the words, "So, for instance, if Tony...").

And, after more pestering on Tony's part, she returns to him the letter that he sent to Adrian when the relationship with Veronica began. It is absolutely nothing like the bland missive he previously told us about. Rather, it is vindictive in the extreme, wishing ill on them both in the crudest terms.



Tony is horrified to read the words his former self had written -- and his current self had forgotten. This is the problem with memory. As Tony puts it: "How often do we tell our own life story? How often do we adjust, embellish, make sly cuts? And the longer life goes on, the fewer are those around to challenge our account, to remind us that our life is not our life, merely the story we have told about our life. Told to others, but -- mainly -- to ourselves... For years you survive with the same loops, the same facts and the same emotions. I press a button marked Adrian or Veronica, the tape runs, the usual stuff spools out. The events reconfirm the emotions -- resentment, a sense of injustice, relief -- and vice versa." But then there's a bombshell -- like this letter, incontrovertibly genuine -- that interrupts the repetition, and sends the memory spinning off in different directions.

Tony feels remorse about this evil communication. And "for the first time, I began to feel a more general remorse -- a feeling somewhere between self-pity and self-hatred -- about my whole life... I had wanted life not to bother me too much, and had succeeded -- and how pitiful that was."

The letter also allows hidden memories to resurface, and a softer picture of the years with Veronica starts to emerge. He gradually remembers details that he'd overwritten before: Veronica dancing, Veronica with him watching the Severn Bore, "how exciting" it always was with her.



Constantly pushed by Tony for further revelations, Veronica sets up a situation where he meets a group of people with intellectual disabilities, who live in a community care facility. One of them, it transpires, is named Adrian, and has a certain familiarity. Tony assumes he is the son of Adrian and Veronica, and is devastated when he is eventually told that he is not Veronica's son, but Veronica's brother -- Sarah's child.

Tony recalls the mathematical way Adrian had set out his "chain of responsibility" in the fragment of diary: "I saw my initial in there. I remembered that in my ugly letter I had urged Adrian to consult Veronica's mother... You get towards the end of life -- no, not life itself, but of something else: the end of any likelihood of change in that life. You are allowed a long moment of pause, time enough to ask the question: what else have I done wrong?... There is accumulation. There is responsibility. And beyond these, there is unrest. There is great unrest."

This is how the book ends. And, to me, it's an extraordinarily moving ending. A summary of our collective human inadequacy.



Which is why I don't follow the reasoning of some reviewers. This one, for example: "I have to say, I think it’s a bit of a stretch to see Tony as responsible for Adrian’s death... To me, Veronica’s obstructive behaviour throughout the novel was not very credible... I think this is also responsible for some of the confusion over the ending. People were looking for Veronica’s irrationality and hostility to be explained, and it wasn’t. Not really. She blamed Tony, apparently, but it seems too harsh." This review, similarly, buys into Tony's initial representation of Veronica.

But these quibbles miss the whole "changing-Tony" arc of the story. The depth charge of the spiteful letter makes him see/remember Veronica differently, recall positive things, even fantasize about the relationship starting again. He's no longer the self-absorbed, pedantic, slightly whiny person he was at the beginning. Whether, generally, he is any more reliable a narrator is another question -- but on this issue he has achieved a little more clarity, albeit at a devastating price. We therefore have to rethink everything he initially told us about Veronica. And, from what we know, surely she does have a right to be angry, and to refuse to pander to Tony's desire for corroboration. Dumped by Tony, who never really seemed to make much attempt to "get it" as far as she was concerned; betrayed by her mother; cheated on by Adrian, whose suicide precluded any kind of reparations; and presumably required to bear some of the burden of her brother's care (he seems to be close to her) -- hers has emphatically been a troubled life.

Adrian's diary fragment concluded: "So, for instance, if Tony..." If Tony what? If Tony hadn't been so obnoxious to the younger Veronica, she wouldn't have been drawn to Adrian in the first place... If Tony hadn't released that vile letter into the world, Adrian wouldn't have opened himself up to one-on-ones with Sarah Ford... If Tony, rather than being obsessed with his hurt pride and social awkwardness, had been perceptive enough to grasp that there was something weird about Veronica's mum, he would have warned his friend away from her, rather than pushing him in that direction. And yes, if Tony hadn't been such an insecure, pig-headed, self-deceiving, self-pitying individual, he would have seen Veronica very differently, and might have had an entirely different life. He knows this, saying of himself: "Yes indeed, if Tony had seen more clearly, acted more decisively, held to truer moral values, settled less easily for a passive peaceableness which he first called happiness and later contentment. If Tony hadn’t been fearful, hadn’t counted on the approval of others for his own self-approval ... and so on, through a succession of hypotheticals leading to the final one: so, for instance, if Tony hadn’t been Tony..."

This is our problem. Always. We're stuck with ourselves.



Just a few more points to conclude, before this post grows to be longer than the book...

There still remains some confusion over the identity of Adrian Junior's father (and the quantity of online speculation is a real testimony to the way Barnes has engaged his readers).

You can find arguments for the obvious candidate, Adrian, and for the out-of-left-field option, Tony.

I think the second explanation is taking the evidence we have too far. But that initial encounter with Sarah does seem to have a power that Tony has not fully acknowledged. Are there more repressed memories out there? Maybe.

James Dalrymple is at least open to the possibility that Tony is the father of the child, but insists: "The novel refuses to answer all its questions... Unlike the detective genre, the ending of Barnes's novella resists totalizing explanation. While a wealth of such attempts can be found online, the diversity of these interpretations suggests that Barnes was playing a game with readers, but not -- according to the rules of the detective genre -- playing fair... It is my belief that Barnes was asking us to reflect on our need to know the answers to an enigma whilst withholding the clues needed to do it, thus impelling readers to actively write the ending themselves."

I owe to Dalrymple, too, a heads-up to the reference contained in the title. Frank Kermode's The Sense of an Ending (subtitled Studies in the Theory of Fiction) was published in 1967. I've read only a couple of reviews, as opposed to the work itself, but it seems to deal with our obsession with making things "make sense". Leo Bersani summarizes the argument like this: "Man's position existentially is intermediary; he is born and dies 'in the middle of things.' What Kermode calls 'fictions' (in both literature and the rest of life) are those 'coherent patterns' which, by providing or implying an ending, 'make possible a satisfying consonance with the origins and with the middle.' These temporal fictions 'humanize the common death' and allow us to coexist with temporal chaos."

Barnes's The Sense of an Ending ultimately testifies to the impossibility of making sense of anything. Our problem is that we can only face backwards as we go into the future, and what we see, facing backwards, becomes more and more dim.



There were a couple of things I found grating about the book (although it's hard, in this kind of work, to disentangle the author from the narrator). Firstly, there seemed to be an assumption of inevitability in the link between the older woman and the child with intellectual disabilities. And, because of all the mystery the plot demands, the older woman remains a cypher and the child something of a stereotype. Secondly, we have two suicides that involve abandoning a pregnant woman and her unborn child, and in neither case did it seem to me that the cruelty of that action attracted sufficient acknowledgement.

But those are comparatively small points in what was a hugely powerful, thought-provoking, and rewarding piece of work.