Originally published in 3000Melbourne magazine.
Carefully distilled into a slim novella, Julian Barnes’ The Sense of an Ending is a sombre and intriguing story that questions the reliability of memory and highlights the limits of self-knowledge. The winner of the 2011 Man Booker Prize, the exquisitely written book centres on the frustrating puzzle of “not getting it” the first time around, and having to revisit the past to make sense of the memories we construct ourselves.
The novella opens with narrator Tony Webster’s recollections of his final years of boarding school in the 1960s. But it’s a new student, and new addition to his group of precocious friends, who is the real centre of the story. An academically gifted “truth-seeker” and lover of Camus who likes to say things like “that’s philosophically self evident,” Adrian Finn appears to his friends as a model of intellectual sophistication. When a fellow student hangs himself after getting his girlfriend pregnant, the boys are awed- not particularly sympathetic, but rather fascinated by the questionable logic of his action. Adrian tells Tony that Camus maintained suicide was the only true philosophical question.
When the boys go off to different universities, Tony becomes involved with a girl called Veronica- prickly, snobbish and difficult, but brilliant and strangely magnetising. She challenges his intellectual arrogance and frustrates his sexual yearnings. Their relationship comes to an abrupt end, and Veronica soon starts going out with Adrian. Then, suddenly, at 22, Adrian commits suicide, leaving a note carefully outlining his philosophical decision to choose death over life.
The second section of the book questions the veracity of everything we have just been told. Tony, now in his 60s and resigned to the ordinariness of his comfortable but unexceptional life, is forced to revisit his past when he receives a solicitor’s letter informing him that, inexplicably, he has been left Adrian’s diary in the will of Veronica’s mother. How she came into possession of it, and what secrets the diary might reveal, sets Tony on a mission to unravel the truth of the past he has so carefully edited in his own mind.
He never gets his hands on the diary itself- Veronica refuses to give it up, repeatedly telling him, “You don’t get it. You never did.” Her refusal to explain the missing pieces of the story is infuriating even to read, and it’s easy to share in Tony’s increasingly frustrated obsession with figuring it out. The answer, when it is finally revealed, almost forces you to read the book again, to look for clues along the way.
The Sense of an Ending is a haunting little book, difficult to put down and harder to stop thinking about. It brings to life an axiom of the human mind – as Tony says, “When we are young, we invent different futures for ourselves; when we are old, we invent different pasts for others.”