It seems fitting that critical and popular opinion would be divided over a book with as vague a title as "The Sense of an Ending."
Recently awarded the annual Man Booker Prize, the novel is British author Julian Barnes' 11th and has now spent an impressive 14 weeks on the New York Times best-sellers list with no signs of budging anytime soon.
Despite the novel's commercial success, critics are bitterly divided in their feelings on the work.
Death in fiction can seem contrived, and given how Barnes' work is predicated on not just one, but two deaths, "The Sense of an Ending" is no exception. Nevertheless, the novel appears quite meticulously planned, with many layers of complexity in its 163 pages. If there's one thing critics can agree on here, it's that Barnes' plot resists any kind of easy explanation.
The story's middle-aged narrator-protagonist Tony Webster begins the novel by describing his youth in 1960s England.
"I'm not very interested in my schooldays, and don't feel any nostalgia for them," he says. "But school is where it all began."
Tony then goes on to describe how he befriended the too-smart-for-his-own-good Adrian Finn in high school and began and ended a relationship with the oh-so-pretentious Veronica Ford in college. Then in an inexplicable turn of events, Veronica begins to date Adrian while the pair are still in school, and Adrian kills himself shortly afterward.
It's when Veronica's mother dies in the novel's second half that the action really takes off. Her will stipulates that Tony should receive a journal that once belonged to Adrian, but is now in Veronica's possession. In his pursuit of the item, Tony embarks on an adventure that's occassionally so slow that it comes as something of a surprise that anyone is still interested in what's happening by the time they reach the end of the novel. Maybe readers are able to stick with the story because that adventure ultimately leads Tony to discover the truth surrounding his former friend's suicide.
"If I can't be sure of the actual events any more, I can at least be true to the impressions those facts left," he states.
"The Sense of an Ending" is told in vignettes which vary from a single sentence to eight pages in length, and each of these ends with a kind of dictum. While the vignettes might be fitting for a story about the vestiges of memory, the dictums are less so, given how upfront Tony is about the fact that the reader should take his narration with a grain of salt.
Unfortunately enough, Tony hits us over the head with the idea of the unreliability of memory so many times the end result is that some readers will end up intellectually concussed and have to put down the novel for some time out of sheer exasperation. It's not clear if Barnes realizes how much his narrator is repeating himself. Maybe at 60-something years old, Tony is starting to get a bit senile.
Apart from this annoying narrative compulsion, however, the writing in the first half of the work sets up the second masterfully. The text thus seems to possess a kind of beautiful circularity that somehow still allows the narrative to avoid becoming predictable.
Certain passages of "The Sense of an Ending" are sure to resonate with the reader, such as when, after returning home from a sojourn to "the States," a young Tony describes sharing with his parents "one of those communal pauses which every family does differently."
The sex talk and quasi-bathroom humor is somewhat less subtle. Consider lines like: "You've got to hold on to it as you pull out" (yes, you know what he's talking about), or, "We were essentially serious taking the piss, except when we were serious."
The bulk of readers who've posted reviews of the book on Amazon have also been troubled by the number of questions that the story's conclusion leaves unanswered. For this reason, a number of critics and lay readers alike have felt compelled to read the work a second time through. Given how certain snippets of information that evade awareness upon first readings ultimately tie these loose ends together, Barnes appears to have engineered the work for such rereadings.
At the end of the story, the reliably unreliable Tony tells us, "You get towards the end of life—no, not life itself, but of something else; the end of any likelihood of change in that life."
In this way, the novel's protagonist—like misguided readers who seek out answers to specific questions rather than any larger wisdom the text might have to impart—implies that he knows something has eluded him without exactly knowing what it is.
If there are any great ideas at work here, it's how close people can actually be to larger truth without ever actually realizing it.
In staking this claim, "The Sense of an Ending" implies that only those of us who can look beyond the trivial are in any kind of position to grasp the bigger lessons life has to offer.