The Sense of an Ending ~ Julian Barnes

This is a wistful book about the fallibility and mutability of memory. The very first words in the novel are “I remember”, and throughout the book we are brought to consider the untrustworthiness of our recollections. “What you end up remembering isn’t always the same as what you have witnessed,” says the narrator.

Later, he says:

We live with such easy assumptions, don’t we? For instance, that memory equals events plus time. But it’s all much odder than this. Who was it said that memory is what we thought we’d forgotten? And it ought to be obvious to us that time doesn’t act as a fixative, rather as a solvent.

Tony Webster is in his mid–60s when he receives an unexpected bequest which causes him to think back on the events of his youth, from his senior years at high school through university and a few years afterwards.

At high school, his group of friends is joined by Adrian, a new arrival at the school. While Adrian fits in well with the group, he is somewhat their intellectual and cultural superior. He has a series of intense classroom debates with their history teacher about whether we can ever make a really objective assessment of historical events, even quite recent ones. But, in a wryly ironic note, the narrator comments that his own recollection of these debates is almost certainly flawed.

Tony tells of his early clumsy encounters with young women, and his constant sexual frustrations at the time. “You may say, But wasn’t this the Sixties? Yes, but only for some people, only in certain parts of the country.”

Eventually, during his university years, he meets Veronica: “About five foot two with rounded, muscular calves, mid-brown hair to her shoulders, blue-grey eyes behind blue-framed spectacles, and a quick yet withholding smile.” It’s this relationship which is at the core of the novel, because he has a bitter break-up with her after a year of going out together. Veronica then takes up with Adrian, Tony’s intellectual school friend. And some time later, unexpectedly, Adrian takes his own life for reasons which are not clear.

All this is many decades in the past as Tony now recounts those events, but they are brought back into his life when he is advised of a bequest from Veronica’s mother Sarah, who he had met only once when visiting her family. The bequest is a modest sum of money and, astonishingly, Adrian’s diary. Except that Veronica is in current possession of the diary and refuses to supply it to Tony.

Tony’s attempts to get hold of the diary and his renewal of contacts with Veronica play out in the rest of the novel. He finds himself confronted with past events and actions of his own which he had forgotten, or badly mis-remembered. It takes him a long time to discover and understand the conseqences resulting from his youthful behaviour.

This is a beautifully-written novel which really makes you think about life, and how our memories can betray us; about how we can fail to grasp what has been going on, even at critical moments of our lives; and how we can deeply misunderstand other human beings.

A Sense of an Ending won the Man Booker Prize in 2011, and deservedly so, I think.

Further reading: Oliver Sacks wrote a very interesting article called “Speak, Memory” on the whole topic of the unreliability of memory in the New York Review of Books. And of course, he has dealt with some of these issues in his collections of case histories.