Review: 'The Sense of an Ending' by Julian Barnes

Winner Man Booker Prize 2011

Please be aware there are some spoilers in this review, not enough to ruin the story for you, but some plot details.

This is a book about perceptions of people and relationships, and how these perceptions change as we get older and gain more knowledge. The style is lucid and easy to read, but is still artfully constructed. It is very rare to find a novel with such a good command of language without being daunting or over-laden with metaphor. The narrative keeps pace very well, and the story unfolds right up until the very end, so, as a reader, one feels very much as if there is always more to know, more information that would enlighten us further. This is not dissimilar to the position of the protagonist, Tony. We are swept up in his world and perceive it through his eyes.  Barnes uses a conversational narrative style which allows us to move through the novel with Tony, learning as he does and exploring his thoughts.

It is not, however, Tony’s life that is really the focus of the novel.  He is, instead, a device for exploring the short life of his school friend, Adrian, who, even after his death, has an ever changing character which we are never truly able to pin down. The novel is tackling not the relationships and characters themselves, but how they are perceived at different points of the narrator’s life and knowledge base. He begins the novel as this aloof, admirable and phenomenally intelligent young man, and his death is puzzling, but we believe wholly his very philosophical suicide note detailing very intellectual reasons for his actions. However, as we (and Tony) learn more and more about what happened to him in the last few years of his life, our idea of who he was changes, even though his actions, obviously, cannot. This is astute storytelling at its finest: the way in which Barnes manages to change nothing and everything about what happened earlier in the book is astounding and compelling.

This change in perceptions centres on another aloof figure, that of Mrs. Ford, a character who is only physically realised once, very briefly, in the entire novel. The bulk of our knowledge of her comes from what we hear from others and what Tony gradually uncovers. Her entire persona is shrouded in enigma, and all of her words and actions are layered with dual meanings, which are explored through examination at different points of knowledge. Actions that we first perceive as strange but kind and apologetic turn out to have a much darker subtext that we never could have imagined in the first telling. The same encounter means different things depending on how much Tony (and so, we as readers) know.

It’s interesting to read a novel which treats its characters in this way, as we realise that there is no way we can accurately judge the characters in any novel, or, indeed, in life, because we just don’t know the whole story, we only have one perception of them. It is thrilling to have a reading experience in which you are constantly aware of what you don’t know as much as what you do, and you learn not to trust first impressions.

It’s short, enthralling and brutally honest. I simply cannot fault it.