The Sense of an Ending - Julian Barnes

Burning a hole in my bookshelf 

pp. 150.
Published: Vintage Books, 2012 (originally published 2011).

This book has been burning a hole in my bookshelf for months. And with its cool blue trim, like ink smudged down the outside edge of its pages, it has looked quite sexy there, laid flat and untidily on a pile of other yet-to-reads. I almost didn't want to take it down and spoil the aesthetics I had going. But I am grateful I did, finally, take it down. It is one of those books so impressive that one feels certain it has changed one, as a reader and as a writer, too.

It is a novel about time and memory. But more pressingly than that it is about the kind of person we think we are, the kind of person we remember ourselves to be, and how that person differs from the person we actually are. How our inconsistent and inaccurate memories can suffocate the truth of who we are, of what we have done in the course of our lives.

Tony Webster is the narrator with the unreliable memory. Part One takes us through his Sixth Form days, his relationship with Veronica, and then, briefly, his marriage to and divorce from Margret. Yet in Part Two, Veronica is brought back into Tony's life unexpectedly, Tony who has become an old man now. He is forced into a trip (if that's what you want to call it, though it's anything but wistful) down memory lane, in which he discovers past events to have taken on a different edge, and in which he finds memories lurking that he didn't know he had.

It is interesting to observe how your perception of events and characters changes as the things you had taken for granted are revised. How, for example, when Tony stays with Veronica's family for the first time, on first impressions we get a sense of an unassailable social class divide between Tony and his girlfriend's family, who seem to hold themselves apart from him, even to be making fun of him. Yet later on in life Tony is struck by specific memories of the weekend, of Veronica seeming less distant than initially portrayed, taking him by the hand one evening to show him upstairs and kiss him goodnight.

In another memory, Tony and a group of fellow students are gathered to see the Severn Bore, a tidal surge in which a wave of water travels upstream against the current. Later on, we find out that 'Veronica had been alongside me. My brain must have erased it from the record, but now I knew it for a fact. She was there with me.' How her presence alters the symbolic meaning of that bore - which crops up later as Tony contemplates the sensation of time going in reverse as his memories are altered - is immense, though not immediately identifiable as such.

Alongside these issues of memory and historical accuracy ('History is the lies of the victors', the young Tony quips in a History lesson), the philosophical musings and overt intellectualism of youth are exposed as a false facade against the trappings of life. As Tony gets older, suffering directly the blows of life, his sardonic youth seems more and more painfully misguided. The competition between him and his mates for the mantle of 'philosopher' becomes a flimsy shield against the prosaic battering that concrete experience gives them.

This is a bit of a coming-of-age novel but with a difference, and with a much greater maturity and complexity than those kinds of novels usually deliver. The book is tightly structured, and its narrator scrutinises everything to such a pathologically self-denigrating extent I occasionally felt I was reading one of J.M. Coetzee's pseudo-memoirs. However, it is difficult - nigh on impossible - to find a novel so well-organised in terms of plot that also carries such an intense philosophical interrogation of life, memory, history, the self, and longing. Readers and writers take note of this book. It sets the standard nauseatingly high.