The Sense of an Ending - by Julian Barnes
Every man’s memory is his private literature
Aldous Huxley
The recent fraying of the United Kingdom under nationalist pressure from Scotland has had the effect of creating a renaissance within Scottish culture. In music, literature and the arts, things Scottish have been coming very much into vogue in British public life, but it's often forgotten that there is also a positive benefit in this for England as well. Until recently, writers like Melvyn Bragg, while reasonably successful, have been held somewhat at arms length by the commentariat of such organs as the BBC and the other London-based cultural outlets, mainly due to their “middle-class, middle-aged, straight white guy” mentalities. Middle-class, middle-aged, straight white guys can’t write about the black experience, the youth experience, the gay, Asian or female experience, so consequently, they don’t count.
To an extent, this was understandable in the context of the last fifty or so years of British social development. Britain as a unit was never an organic entity in the way its component nations were. Essentially, it was an imperial construct, the extension of “Englishness” to the less fortunate Celtic fringe, the Empire’s attempt at “inclusivity”, and with the receding of that empire into the seas of history, the nations of Britain began to reassert their individual identities. For a while, this entailed sidelining things “British” (for which we read “English”), but in the wake of the new Scottish enlightenment, there appears to be something stirring within English sensibilities as well.
Julian Barnes is about as English as they come, middle-aged (actually, he’s in his late sixties, but “middle-aged” is a concept which tends to roll back as you approach it), straight, white and writes in complete sentences. He also writes about reasonable people who don’t make a scene when you cut in front of them in a queue, who live in one room flats and who send a monthly donation to Oxfam. Ordinary people. Average people. Boring people.
Somehow, however, he isn’t a boring writer. Maybe that’s a product of experience, for this novel (really a novella) is cut right down to the bone and then shaved to the marrow, yet somehow it doesn’t read like Elmore Leonard. It’s graceful, literate and even uses the occasional adverb. It’s narrator has a story to tell, and he tells it in a very English way, with minimum verbiage, but complete candour. He calls a spade a spade; by which I mean, he doesn’t call it a manual excavation implement, and neither does he call it a bloody shovel. It’s a spade, and he uses the word. Good for him.
Tony Webster is an average, sixty-something Englishman. Father of one child, amicably divorced, still on friendly terms with the ex, he’s one of millions. There is absolutely nothing remarkable about him, which is rather the point of the story.
The receipt of a small bequest from a woman he last saw forty-odd years previously is his catalyst. The woman, the mother of an ex-girlfriend with whom he had broken in the 1960s, had only met Tony once, and has left him £500 and a diary. The money bequest is weird enough, but the diary is that of an old school friend, Adrian Finn. Adrian was the brightest of the group to whom Tony had belonged at School, the one of whom most had been expected. But Adrian had committed suicide at 22, having first “taken up with” Veronica, Tony’s ex-girlfriend and daughter of his benefactress. All of that was four decades previously, and in the meantime, Tony has had his life. An average life. A pretty boring life. All in all, a thoroughly English life.
The problem is that Veronica now has the diary, and is very reluctant to return it. The rest of the story revolves around his efforts to retrieve it. However, this is not a mystery tale, its not a thriller or an adventure and there is no heart-stopping action or breathless excitement. Its just a good, interesting story.
The diary, of course, is a MacGuffin. In the end, it's what Tony discovers pursuing it that is of far more universal application than anything it may contain, and the kernel of the story is the way we construct our own pasts, the way history is not only written by the victors, but subject to, as one character puts it, the lies and self-delusions of the defeated.
How Barnes takes us through such a monumentally huge theme in so short a work is remarkable and, although I haven’t read any of the competitors, the Man Booker prize the book won was well deserved. The skill with which Barnes re-writes Tony’s history before his eyes is amazing, and not a little disturbing, for Tony is not mad, deluded, the subject of some freakish mind-control experiment or any of the myriad other devices or plotlines one might find in a science fiction or mystery novel.
Because, of course, it isn’t a science fiction or mystery novel. It’s the very ordinary story of a very ordinary man being subjected to the very ordinary forces at work on very ordinary lives. Lives like yours and mine. And somehow, the sum of all this ordinariness is not in the least ordinary, and when it’s over, Tony’s private literature is blue-pencilled and the characters redrawn.
It’s a short book which can be read in a couple of sittings and I suggest you do it that way. And then read it again. Highly recommended.
Aldous Huxley
The recent fraying of the United Kingdom under nationalist pressure from Scotland has had the effect of creating a renaissance within Scottish culture. In music, literature and the arts, things Scottish have been coming very much into vogue in British public life, but it's often forgotten that there is also a positive benefit in this for England as well. Until recently, writers like Melvyn Bragg, while reasonably successful, have been held somewhat at arms length by the commentariat of such organs as the BBC and the other London-based cultural outlets, mainly due to their “middle-class, middle-aged, straight white guy” mentalities. Middle-class, middle-aged, straight white guys can’t write about the black experience, the youth experience, the gay, Asian or female experience, so consequently, they don’t count.
To an extent, this was understandable in the context of the last fifty or so years of British social development. Britain as a unit was never an organic entity in the way its component nations were. Essentially, it was an imperial construct, the extension of “Englishness” to the less fortunate Celtic fringe, the Empire’s attempt at “inclusivity”, and with the receding of that empire into the seas of history, the nations of Britain began to reassert their individual identities. For a while, this entailed sidelining things “British” (for which we read “English”), but in the wake of the new Scottish enlightenment, there appears to be something stirring within English sensibilities as well.
Julian Barnes is about as English as they come, middle-aged (actually, he’s in his late sixties, but “middle-aged” is a concept which tends to roll back as you approach it), straight, white and writes in complete sentences. He also writes about reasonable people who don’t make a scene when you cut in front of them in a queue, who live in one room flats and who send a monthly donation to Oxfam. Ordinary people. Average people. Boring people.
Somehow, however, he isn’t a boring writer. Maybe that’s a product of experience, for this novel (really a novella) is cut right down to the bone and then shaved to the marrow, yet somehow it doesn’t read like Elmore Leonard. It’s graceful, literate and even uses the occasional adverb. It’s narrator has a story to tell, and he tells it in a very English way, with minimum verbiage, but complete candour. He calls a spade a spade; by which I mean, he doesn’t call it a manual excavation implement, and neither does he call it a bloody shovel. It’s a spade, and he uses the word. Good for him.
Tony Webster is an average, sixty-something Englishman. Father of one child, amicably divorced, still on friendly terms with the ex, he’s one of millions. There is absolutely nothing remarkable about him, which is rather the point of the story.
The receipt of a small bequest from a woman he last saw forty-odd years previously is his catalyst. The woman, the mother of an ex-girlfriend with whom he had broken in the 1960s, had only met Tony once, and has left him £500 and a diary. The money bequest is weird enough, but the diary is that of an old school friend, Adrian Finn. Adrian was the brightest of the group to whom Tony had belonged at School, the one of whom most had been expected. But Adrian had committed suicide at 22, having first “taken up with” Veronica, Tony’s ex-girlfriend and daughter of his benefactress. All of that was four decades previously, and in the meantime, Tony has had his life. An average life. A pretty boring life. All in all, a thoroughly English life.
The problem is that Veronica now has the diary, and is very reluctant to return it. The rest of the story revolves around his efforts to retrieve it. However, this is not a mystery tale, its not a thriller or an adventure and there is no heart-stopping action or breathless excitement. Its just a good, interesting story.
The diary, of course, is a MacGuffin. In the end, it's what Tony discovers pursuing it that is of far more universal application than anything it may contain, and the kernel of the story is the way we construct our own pasts, the way history is not only written by the victors, but subject to, as one character puts it, the lies and self-delusions of the defeated.
How Barnes takes us through such a monumentally huge theme in so short a work is remarkable and, although I haven’t read any of the competitors, the Man Booker prize the book won was well deserved. The skill with which Barnes re-writes Tony’s history before his eyes is amazing, and not a little disturbing, for Tony is not mad, deluded, the subject of some freakish mind-control experiment or any of the myriad other devices or plotlines one might find in a science fiction or mystery novel.
Because, of course, it isn’t a science fiction or mystery novel. It’s the very ordinary story of a very ordinary man being subjected to the very ordinary forces at work on very ordinary lives. Lives like yours and mine. And somehow, the sum of all this ordinariness is not in the least ordinary, and when it’s over, Tony’s private literature is blue-pencilled and the characters redrawn.
It’s a short book which can be read in a couple of sittings and I suggest you do it that way. And then read it again. Highly recommended.