The Sense of an Ending - Julian Barnes

       Whenever reading a book, as a writer yourself, you has to ask, is this original? Is the novel I have cradled in my gently sweating palms free from cliché, doing something original? You might think these questions would be especially at the forefront of the minds of those entrusted to judge this year’s Booker Prize list winner. Oh how terribly, terribly wrong you would be.

     This review is not a discussion of that prize, or the controversy surrounding its selection. It does however concern the winning novel, Julian Barnes’ ‘The Sense of an Ending’. And a novel with less fluidity and originality there is not. Thank god it was short because Barnes’ work had you reaching for the nearest light blue recycling box, ready to gleefully dispose of its hundred or so pages.

      ‘The Sense of an Ending’ begins with a fairly typical description of teenage insecurity, awkwardness and fumbling in the dark. Like a bawdy Martin Amis novel, it deals with the grit of youthful sexual vigour, the protagonist Tony ‘promptly wanking into the little basin’ at his girlfriend Veronica’s house once she has walked him coquettishly to his single bedded room. Sadly, Barnes doesn’t realise he’s writing a Martin Amis novel, and leaves out the humour and true to life qualities of Amis’ prose. Instead he is attempts to build to a more serious point about approbation, responsibility and blame in later life for the acts of one’s youth. But why then start with such spunking, corridor-creeping adventures?

         The subsequent chapters dealt with now sixty year old Tony Webster’s recollections of a grey, mediocre life. He has been once divorced, loves his child Susie the product of that marriage, and now lives an average life. But this second section really took the prize for melancholia- the first part of the novel at least had some colour; the discussions between Old Joe Hunt, the history master, and his teenage charges about philosophy and history were very Alan Bennett-esque and held a few seconds of delight for the reader. But the reminiscing of Webster just sucked the marrow out of the reader’s very bones. Such mediocrity, such grey matter, would have any reader reaching for a whisky and another cigarette. Yes people do have dull lives, of course, they go about them every day, and most people don’t follow up their dreams and visions. Like Webster’s characters they divorce, have children and let life get in the way. But where was any sense of escape or joy!? In his acceptance speech for the Booker Prize Julian Barnes praised his production team for creating a book that genuinely looked beautiful, an object to cherish and want to own in hardback non-electronic form, an aesthetic art object in other words. And art objects fascinate and enthral us, and take us to other worlds to enjoy. This took the reader to a rut, a crossroads of introspective stagnancy that took hours to budge. To his credit and this is a rare awarded plus in this review, the novel made you look introspectively. It failed to lend an escapism, a way out from life, and instead plunged you so far into life, into the corner of the room, the gritty eeking out of every day that one could do nothing but sit, trapped and mulling it over. This was a muted success then partly, because escapism and reflection are both equally praise-worthy features of a good novel.

         The final section dealt with atonement: Webster met up with the ‘flame’ of his youth, Veronica, after a large amount of email based bargaining. We discover she is holding on to the diary of one of Webster’s school friends who subsequently dated Veronica after Webster, before committing suicide. Throughout the novel, Barnes’ discusses memory, truth and recollection, and one feels there is a bubbling undercurrent being created which will lead to some monumental and incredibly well penned twist at the finale. Instead the final discoveries; of a mentally handicapped child’s existence who seems the product of either Webster or his friend’s affairs with Veronica but who ultimately turns out to be the child of her mother and his friend were second rate to say the least and not in the least bit surprising. Even the inclusion of this disabled child, now grown to adulthood, was less thought provoking, more perversely decorative, as if Barnes needed a twist and so reached into the great filing cabinet of clichéd plot endings and picked a mildly topical folder. This was disheartening, because, to Barnes’ credit he did create such undercurrent- ‘The Sense of an Ending’ had a strong sense of expectation, of crawling towards a twisty ending.

     Julian Barnes’ is a writer who can capture vivid, real moments; the throwing of a hot pan of eggs into a cold sink or a clumsy teenager satisfying his unconsummated lust alone. But these moments were not arranged carefully or effectively in ‘The Sense of an Ending’; instead the book was a hash of pre-influenced, samey prose. No wonder he had to wait so long for the Booker to be begrudgingly awarded to his long suffering self.

James Birkett