The Sense of an Ending - Julian Barnes

     The 2011 Man Booker Prize winner, The Sense of an Ending is a book about time and memory.  Although it is a little slip of a book (I read it in one day), it is a powerful, thought-provoking novel that explores what it is to be human, to live a life, to accumulate a history.

We live in time - it holds us and moulds us - but I've ever felt I understood it very well. And I'm not referring to theories about how it bends and doubles back, or may exist elsewhere in parallel versions. No, I mean ordinary, everyday time, which clocks and watches assure us passes regularly: tick-tock, click-clock. And yet it takes only the smallest pleasure or pain to teach us time's  malleability. Some emotions speed it up, others slow it down; occasionally, it seems to go missing - until the eventual point when it really does go missing, never to return.

     When protagonist Tony Webster, a retiree in his 60s, learns that the mother of his college girlfriend, Veronica, has left him a bequest (500 pounds and the diary of a school friend, Adrian), it forces him to look back on his past and his memories.  He met Veronica's mother only once - during a weekend visit to her home.  He revisits his youth, his childhood friendships, and his first love.  Tony tracks down Veronica and he discovers that he had cruelly wounded his friends years ago.  Suddenly his past and his vision of himself may require revision.
     In an NPR interview, Barnes said that the book explores memory and time:  "What time does to memory and what memory does to time, how they interact. And it's also about what happens to someone in later years when they discover that some of the certainties they've always relied on, certainties in their mind and memory ... are beginning to be undermined."
     In aging and growing old we tend to look back on the past and on our personal histories but as we grow older it becomes more difficult to verify and corroborate the past as the people who shared that past - our peers, our families - are lost.  As Barnes says in the novel:   "The history that happens underneath our noses ought to be the clearest. And yet, it's the most deliquescent."

     Tony is confronted with a letter he wrote 40 years earlier:  "I reread this letter several times.  I could scarcely deny its authorship or its ugliness.  All I could plead was that I had been its author then, but was not its author now.  Indeed, I didn't recognize that part of myself from which the letter came.  But perhaps this was simply further self-deception."

     As Tony looks back on his life, he begins to question the life he has chosen for himself.  He has always had an instinct for self-preservation but now he wonders if in choosing the "peaceable" life he has lived he has chosen not to live life fully:  “We thought we were being mature when we were only being safe. We imagined we were being responsible but were only being cowardly. What we called realism turned out to be a way of avoiding things rather than facing them.”
     Beautifully written and carefully crafted, this was my first Barnes novel and now I think I will have to read more.

~ Frances