The Sense of an Ending [Paperback]

Julian Barnes (Author)

Book Description

Release date: May 29, 2012

Winner of the 2011 Man Booker Prize

One of The Atlantic's Best Books I Read This Year

A novel so compelling that it begs to be read in a single setting, The Sense of an Ending has the psychological and emotional depth and sophistication of Henry James at his best, and is a stunning new chapter in Julian Barnes's oeuvre.
 
This intense novel follows Tony Webster, a middle-aged man, as he contends with a past he never thought much about—until his closest childhood friends return with a vengeance: one of them from the grave, another maddeningly present. Tony thought he left this all behind as he built a life for himself, and his career has provided him with a secure retirement and an amicable relationship with his ex-wife and daughter, who now has a family of her own. But when he is presented with a mysterious legacy, he is forced to revise his estimation of his own nature and place in the world.

Editorial Reviews

Review

“Elegant, playful, and remarkable.” —The New Yorker
 
“A page-turner, and when you finish you will return immediately to the beginning.” —San Francisco Chronicle

“Beautiful. . . . An elegantly composed, quietly devastating tale.” —Heller McAlpin, NPR
 
“Dense with philosophical ideas. . . . It manages to create genuine suspense as a sort of psychological detective story.” —Michiko Kakutani, The New York Times

“Evelyn Waugh did it in Brideshead Revisited, as did Philip Larkin in Jill [and] Kazuo Ishiguro in The Remains of the Day. Now, with his powerfully compact new novel, Julian Barnes takes his place among the subtly assertive practitioners of this quiet art.” —The New York Times Book Review
 
“[A] jewel of conciseness and precision…. The Sense of an Ending packs into so few pages so much that the reader finishes it with a sense of satisfaction more often derived from novels several times its length.” —The Los Angeles Times
 
“Exquisitely crafted, sophisticated, suspenseful, and achingly painful, The Sense of an Ending is a meditation on history, memory, and individual responsibility.” —The Philadelphia Inquirer
 
“Clever, provocative. . . . A brilliant, understated examination of memory and how it works, how it compartmentalizes and fixes impressions to tidily store away.” —The Minneapolis Star-Tribune
 
“Concisely written and yet rich and full of emotional depth. . . . It’s highly original as well. And complicated, just like life.” —New York Journal of Books

“Elegiac yet potent, The Sense of an Ending probes the mysteries of how we remember and our impulse to redact, correct—and sometimes entirely erase—our pasts.” —Vogue
 
“Ominous and disturbing….  This outwardly tidy and conventional story is one of Barnes’s most indelible [and] looms oppressively in our minds.” —The Wall Street Journal
 
“At 163 pages, The Sense of an Ending is the longest book I have ever read, so prepare yourself for rereading. You won’t regret it.” —Jane Juska, The San Francisco Chronicle
 
“With his characteristic grace and skill, Barnes manages to turn this cat-and-mouse game into something genuinely suspenseful.” —The Washington Post
 
“Ferocious. . . . A book for the ages.” —Cleveland Plain Dealer
 
“Concisely written and yet rich and full of emotional depth. . . . At times, side-splittingly funny, at others, brutally honest, but always delightfully well observed. . . . Ironically, despite focusing on endings, and on suicide, this is a tremendously life-affirming work. It’s highly original as well. And complicated, just like life.” —New York Journal of Books
 
“Elegiac yet potent, The Sense of an Ending probes the mysteries of how we remember and our impulse to redact, correct – and sometimes entirely erase – our pasts. . . . Barnes’s highly wrought meditation on aging gives just as much resonance to what is unknown and unspoken as it does to the momentum of its own plot.” —Vogue
 
“Novel, fertile and memorable . . . . A highly wrought meditation on aging, memory and regret.” —The Guardian (London)
 
“A brilliant, understated examination of memory and how it works, how it compartmentalizes and fixes impressions to tidily store away. . . . Clever, provocative. . . . Barnes reminds his readers how fragile is the tissue of impressions we conveniently rely upon as bedrock.” —Minneapolis Star-Tribune
 
"Brief, beautiful. . . . That fundamentally chilling question—Am I the person I think I am?—turns out to be a surprisingly suspenseful one. . . . As Barnes so elegantly and poignantly reveals, we are all unreliable narrators, redeemed not by the accuracy of our memories but by our willingness to question them." —The Boston Globe.
 
“Quietly mesmerizing. . . . A slow burn, measured but suspenseful, this compact novel makes every slyly crafted sentence count.” —The Independent (London)
 
"Deliciously intriguing...with complex and subtle undertones [and] laced with Barnes' trademark wit and graceful writing." —The Washington Times

About the Author

Julian Barnes is the author of ten previous novels, three books of short stories, and three collections of journalism. In addition to the Booker Prize, his other honors include the Somerset Maugham Award, the Geoffrey Faber Memorial Prize, and the E.M. Forster Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. He lives in London.

www.julianbarnes.com

See all Editorial Reviews

Product Details

• Paperback: 163 pages
• Publisher: Vintage Books; 1st edition (May 29, 2012)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 9780307947727
• ISBN-13: 978-0307947727
• ASIN: 0307947726
• Product Dimensions: 5.4 x 0.5 x 8 inches
• Shipping Weight: 4.8 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 3.9 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (729 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,348 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
  • #71 in Books > Mystery, Thriller & Suspense > Thrillers > Psychological Thrillers

More About the Author

Julian Barnes is the author of nine novels, including Metroland, Flaubert's Parrot, A History of the World in 10 ½ Chapters, England, England and Arthur and George, and two collections of short stories, Cross Channel and The Lemon Table.

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

290 of 311 people found the following review helpful

5.0 out of 5 stars "How far do the limits of responsibility extend?" November 1, 2011

By jfp2006

Format:Hardcover

**CONTAINS SPOILERS**
I see that The Sense of an Ending has polarized opinion here and there. Personally I found it an almost - but not quite - immaculate piece of short fiction. And far, far superior to the other four Booker-shortlisted titles I've read. Barnes's novella is to my mind a minor classic.

The evidence of Barnes's mastery is there right from the title. I remember being struck, when reading one of Barnes's earlier novels, Talking It Over, by the way in which the title gradually took on a meaning radically different from what might have been anticipated: it might be supposed that people talk things over in order to make sense of them, to reach a more accurate understanding of them. However, it became clear that the alternating narrators of Talking It Over found themselves, whether or not deliberately, complicating the meaning of events and experiences by narrating them: talking things over became strangely similar to covering things over, or papering over awkward cracks.

Similarly, The Sense of an Ending is a title which begins to swim before the reader's eyes. The narrator, Tony, this time well into middle age, is, again, thinking things over. This time there is at least a double ambiguity: the "ending" can be taken to be death itself, or, more vaguely, the way various things turn out. And the sense of an ending is both the premonition of death, and of the fact that life is less and less likely to change radically towards its end, as one gets older - and also the need to make sense, retrospectively, of past events, including the death of Adrian, an old schoolfriend of the narrator's....

The most important event in the novel ostensibly appears to be the fact that Adrian started going out with Tony's ex-girlfriend, Veronica, during their final year at different universities and, encouraged by Veronica, sought Tony's benediction of the relationship. The reply sent by Tony is dealt with fairly obliquely in the first part of the novella ("As far as I remember, I told him pretty much what I thought of their joint moral scruples.") But then a photocopy of the letter falls into his hands over forty years later, and this time is given reproduced in full. It is one of the most devastatingly cruel letters imaginable: sour grapes at their most unpleasantly acidic.

And it seems that most of the narrator's later disillusionment and remorse revolves around that incident. Except that he is, towards the end, forced to start making sense of something which he had never suspected...

The conclusion has been felt by many to be unsatisfactory and implausible. I can imagine Julian Barnes receiving numerous letters asking him whether we are supposed to understand that Adrian in fact... And I can imagine the smile on his face as he reads them (and perhaps answers them...) But of course Barnes is not going to give any answers - any more than he chose to complete the sentence "So, for instance, if Tony" at the end of the isolated page from Adrian's diary.

Much speculation has appeared on the Booker site. Did Adrian...? Did Tony...? But when the penultimate section of the novel - the one where the narrator finally says "I got it" - is read carefully, I think the reader gets it too. In other words:

******SPOILER ALERT******
Veronica's mother Sarah ("making a secret horizontal gesture") tried to seduce Tony, her daughter's boyfriend. The broken eggs in the frying pan seem to symbolize a certain lackadaisical waywardness on her part. And she later succeeded in seducing her daughter's next boyfriend, Adrian, and thereafter giving birth to a handicapped child.

The clues, when the reader looks back carefully, are there, notably when the schoolboys speculate about Adrian's separated parents and one of them (we never learn which one, and it doesn't matter) says "Maybe your mum has a young lover?" Of course, this is a reference to Adrian's mother, not Mrs Ford; nevertheless, the possiblity of toyboy lovers is clearly posited.

We also learn that Mrs Ford, widowed, as far as we can determine, around the age of fifty, moved to London and "took in lodgers, even though she'd been left well provided for." Possibly to keep her emotional and sexual options open in seventies London...
******END OF SPOILER ALERT******

But, in the end, surely the point is that we can never be absolutely and totally sure about anything...

I said earlier that I found the novel "not quite" immaculate, and that's because of the

******SPOILER ALERT******
hair-raising trips in Veronica's car towards the end. It's a slightly heavy-handed way of indicating that Veronica is in fact more damaged than Tony realised.
******END OF SPOILER ALERT******

And another couple of minor quibbles:
* Tony's letter, written in the late sixties, refers to Veronica as "a control freak". Was that phrase around then? Isn't it an anachronism?
* The metaphorical "ice flow" on page 132 [UK edition] should be an "ice floe".

But, all in all, The Sense of an Ending is a deeply moral novel about the need to make sense of one's actions, and the need to face up to the consequences of actions which may have seemed inconsequential, or inexplicable, initially. Time, the novel makes clear, catches up on people. Irresponsible actions come home to roost. Similar points were made, with similar elegance and mastery, in John Banville's The Sea.

The whole things clocks in, allowing for the blank pages, at only 145 pages. But I reckon it a far superior work to the longer novels which were shortlisted - just as Banville's The Sea was far superior to Ishiguro's vastly overrated Never Let Me Go six years ago. Read more ›

582 of 638 people found the following review helpful

5.0 out of 5 stars Well, I didn't get it either October 18, 2011

By Susan Tunis TOP 100 REVIEWERVINE™ VOICE

Format:Hardcover

At 176 pages, The Sense of an Ending, Julian Barnes Man Booker-nominated latest is barely even a novella. Yet, there's something to be said for an author willing to tell a story in the time that is needed to tell it, and not feeling compelled to pad the narrative. Mr. Barnes has included exactly what's needed within these pages and not a word more.

His tale is told in two parts, by everyman narrator Tony Webster. The first part, comprising approximately a third of the book, reads like a coming-of-age story. It recounts the formative relationships of Tony's early life, both male and female, from his school days through early adulthood. We meet his closest friends, witness his earliest romances, and experience his first losses. This first section was good, but not great on its own.

The novella flowered in its second, longer part, set 40 years later. Now Tony is in his early 60's, amicably divorced, and a generally content man. One day, he receives notification of an unexpected and frankly bewildering bequest--which is then even more bewilderingly withheld. These contemporary happenings open windows to events of the past and Mr. Barnes held me rapt with the tale.

Despite the compelling plotline, go into this novella expecting it to be character-driven rather than plot-driven. In the end, the inheritance is a MacGuffin, and not really that important after all. It's the relationships of the characters that really tell this tale, and they are beautifully rendered.

Throughout the latter part of the story, Tony is told repeatedly (and without explanation, of course), "You just don't understand!" Well, he thought he did, and I thought he did. But it isn't until the very final lines of the novella that the full truth is made clear.... The Sense of an Ending is brief, and it is masterful, and if it wins the Man Booker Prize in a few minutes, it will be entirely deserving. Read more ›

224 of 250 people found the following review helpful

5.0 out of 5 stars A beautiful work August 23, 2011

By Morris Massel

Format:Hardcover

The Sense of an Ending is the 2011 Man Booker winner by Julian Barnes. A few months ago, I read Barnes' recent short story collection, Pulse. This novel was far superior to Pulse and worthy of the 2011 Booker. Having been shortlisted for the Booker three previous times (Flaubert's Parrot (1984), England, England (1998) and Arthur and George (2005)), Barnes finally won.

A summary of the plot is almost besides the point. This is a book about memory and getting old. The narrator, Tony Webster, is an ordinary guy, who shares his recollection of how his group of three friends becomes a group of four when a new, highly intellectual kid, Adrian, joins their school. Tony also shares details of his youthful relationship with Veronica. Tony meets Veronica's family and develops a warm relationship with her mother. After the inevitable breakup, Veronica and Adrian date. Years later and long after Veronica and Adrian are through, Veronica and the memory of Adrian reenter Tony's life.

Throughout the novella, Barnes beautifully creates the ephemeral feel of memory on the page. The book is well written and exhibits Barnes' talent for dialogue and creating a compelling story around an ordinary and otherwise uninteresting character. Unlike some of the stories in Pulse, Barnes does not write this with great flourish because it would be inconsistent with the ordinary nature of his main character.

If you liked Tinkers (Paul Harding's gorgeous surprise 2010 Pulitzer winner), this should appeal to you.