Welcome to our Reading Group for The Sense of an Ending by Julian Barnes
We’re not great believers in prizes—we do not accept “multi-awarded” as a proper word and we demand that anyone who describes himself thus be clubbed unconscious with his trophies. However we were delighted when Julian Barnes was awarded this year’s Booker Prize for his novel, The Sense of an Ending. It was a very satisfying outcome not just because it was Barnes’s fourth time on the shortlist but because of the flap over Booker chair Stella Rimington’s statement that she was looking for “readable” books.* Julian Barnes writes elegant, subtle, inventive fiction that also happens to be readable.
We have been fans of Barnes since the 90s when we read Talking It Over, a love triangle narrated by its protagonists. (That novel has had a big influence on our use of pronouns—”…put their head round the door”). Afterwards we read A History of the World in 10 1/2 Chapters, whose narrator is most…unusual. The Sense of an Ending features Barnes’s most interesting narrator: a man who doesn’t get it.
Welcome to The Sense of an Ending Reading Group. We’ve prepared a few guide questions which you should feel free to ignore; the aim is to have an open discussion about the novel. Anyone who’s read TSOAE may join the discussion—post your thoughts in Comments. If your copy of TSOAE came from us, we expect scintillating insights haha.
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Warning: If you have not read The Sense of an Ending, this discussion contains spoilers.
1. Characters. What do you think of Tony Webster? Is your impression at odds with what Tony Webster thinks of Tony Webster? Do you know anyone who’s like him? Does he remind you of you?
What about Veronica, Adrian, Margaret and Sarah? (Sarah as in Old Testament Sarah who gave birth in her old age?) Do you agree with Tony’s assessment of them? This is a narrator who has edited his life so he can live with himself. What has he left out? Clearly his feelings about Veronica were more complex than he’s let on. What do you think their relationship was really like?
2. Images. The novel opens with them. We can’t get wrists out of our minds: the watch worn facing inwards, Veronica wanking, Adrian’s suicide. And then semen sluicing down the drain, contrasting with the upstream tidal wave. The Thames and the bloody bathwater. What image or scene in the novel has stayed with you?
Did Tony forget or did he fail to mention something that happened while they were watching the Severn Bore?
3. Style. Tony Webster is your classic unreliable narrator: his memory is faulty, his credibility wonky. (Julian Barnes has cited the unreliable narrator classic, The Good Soldier by Ford Madox Ford. Read it, it’s harrowing. So what IS a reliable narrator? Isn’t anything first-person dubious?) When did it occur to you that Tony is not a trustworthy witness to his own life? That you may know more about him than he does? How does Barnes achieve this effect?
What do you think of Barnes’s style? “Readable” or requiring more effort than usual?
4. What does the title mean to you? No points for mentioning Frank Kermode.
5. If you have not read the book, stop reading this post right now. Almost the minute we finished reading this novel we started reading it again. What did we miss? What were we looking for, and how could we find it in these pages when Tony doesn’t remember or has chosen to forget it?
What do you think happened? Why the will? Tell us the story of Tony, Adrian, Veronica and Sarah in chronological order.
6. Anything you’d like to add?
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We’re doing an Ambeth and bringing in the chismis. The Sense of an Ending turns on the nasty letter that Tony writes to his clever friend Adrian and ex-girlfriend Veronica after they announce that they are dating. We could not help thinking of the nasty letter that Julian Barnes reportedly wrote his clever friend Martin Amis. They also fell out over a woman—Barnes’s wife Pat Kavanagh, who had been Amis’s literary agent until he dumped her for a famous New York shark. According to Amis that letter ended with two words, seven letters, three of them f’s.
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*Incidentally the 2012 Booker jury will be chaired by Peter Stothard, editor of the Times Literary Supplement, acclaimed diarist and classicist. Not only does next year’s chair have impeccable literary credentials but he knows that JessicaRulestheUniverse exists and he has cited us in his TLS blog. Clearly the president of the Classical Association was joking when he mentioned our comment about Phaeton, but we liked the “web-friend” reference.
Answers to questions you might be asking, unless you wandered onto this site purely by accident >>>
November 13th, 2011 at 20:03
Anthony Webster, for all his philosophical analysis of life, love and death has underestimated what women are capable of doing. The male’s point of view can be myopic sometimes, if not most of the time. I’m not so sure kung napaglaruan si Tony ng mag-ina but clearly there was competition between Veronica and her mother hence the £500 blood money. Tony was spared the tragedy since his relationship with Veronica failed miserably. Had he continued his relationship with Veronica, he could have had a relationship with Mrs. Ford as well, just like Finn. Does Mrs. Ford still fancy Tony Webster since she wants him to have Finn’s diary? We don’t know her motives even if her last letter indicated “because you’re Finn’s friend …” Sabi nga ni Ate Vi, we can never can tell.
I don’t know how English society views women despite having a Queen for a leader. Tony for his part only recognizes what he wants to see and he’s missing the point of his relationships with women. Is this the result of having gone to an all-male school? I don’t know.
As for Finn I don’t blame him; I admire his courage.
November 14th, 2011 at 12:00
1.
Tony Webster is at great unrest, like his classmate’s description of Henry VIII’s reign and like the way his story ends. Why muddle through all these if he’s at ease, if he found closure with things past? And why make a conscious selection of memories in the first place? After reading the book in one sitting as the dust jacket demanded, I feel that I share his memories, owing to the novel’s point of view. Reading the novel is like having a friend sleep over at your place, lying on the bed in the dark, telling random stories and confessions, and you, as the reader, urging the other to keep going and to reexamine things in retrospect.
And yes, he somehow reminds me of me, not the willful forgetting of a person in a memory, but the confusion of whether one memory indeed took place nor not.
I know someone who’s like him, and coincidentally, that person is Veronica, not his ex, but the narrator of another Booker winner, The Gathering by Anne Enright. I must say that this Veronica is a worse narrator because she deliberately makes up and erases her memories at many points in the novel, something like, “That did not really happen, this is what happened, no, this is really what happened, etc.”
Back to the novel, we have to give more credit to Veronica than what Tony implies is her due. Clearly, Tony is playing the victim, but at the end, we ask ourselves whether he really was the damaged one in their tumultuous relationship or not. I cannot agree with how he assessed Veronica or Adrian. I think Veronica is relationship material, as opposed to Tony who is not very good in handling commitments.
But we really could not draw a lot of conclusions about the mentioned characters, especially Sarah, whom Tony only has one interaction, because our only basis is Tony’s questionable narrative. All the characters are a mystery. It’s just like what Adrian said in one of their history classes, about knowing the life of the historian in order to understand history further. And this account, Tony’s edited life, is what we are presented.
2.
The bloody bathwater is the image that stayed with me, and we all know that Tony did not even see this for himself. It’s funny how the mind can make up memories, which the narrator perfectly stressed on the first page, and we barely have time to evaluate whether these are real memories, dreams, books we’ve read, movies we’ve seen, imagination.
Given Tony’s unreliable, if not failing, memory, the questions about the events at Severn Bore is hardly answerable. He remembers being there. He remembers the tide chasing other people. He remembers suddenly that he was with Veronica. He might as well be making it up to add something beautiful in his past with Veronica. The memory is only made dubious since his sudden remembrance of being with her came up during the time when he was reconnecting with her.
3.
First-person is never reliable whoever the narrator is, but it is an intimate and intriguing way of storytelling. If we want more reliable, objective narration, we should go for the all-knowing, omniscient narrator, who reads every character’s mind, but I’d rather not have this because it feels like reading court proceedings. I prefer the shifty narrator because the reader is allowed to react against the story that is presented to him.
When Tony mentions in the first page that the last in the list of things that he remembers is not something that he actually saw, I already knew that he is someone who will be guilty of adding and removing details in the story. This is heightened at Part Two, where his storytelling begins shifting randomly. This clipped and jumpy narration is Barnes’s way of letting us know that there is more to Tony’s account than what he is saying.
Barnes’s style is readable. As I mentioned, it feels like having an overnight conversation with a friend. Effort comes in unraveling what really has happened.
4.
It is how the novel ended. It is what we have when we cannot undo certain things. We only have a sense of an ending when something in our lives has been buried too deep that we are fooled to believe that it really has ended.
5.
We might have missed a lot of things, and we can’t be sure what to look for. Should we study Tony’s state of mind to reflect his past, as suggested by Tony himself? Should we go all the way back to that time when he met Adrian? How about that boring weekend with Veronica’s family where he met her mother? I even suspect that there’s a more intimate memory with Sarah that Tony didn’t bother to tell.
This is how I remember the events:
-Tony and Adrian become friends at school.
-Tony and Veronica go out.
-Tony spends weekend at Veronica’s, therefore meeting Sarah.
-Veronica meets Tony’s friends, including Adrian.
-Tony at Severn Bore, with or without Veronica.
-Tony and Veronica break up. Severn Bore may have happened after the break up.
-Adrian and Veronica go out.
-They tell Tony of their relationship.
-Tony sends The Letter.
-Adrian spends weekend at Veronica’s.
-Adrian considers The Letter; Sarah gives same advice to Adrian; they discuss Veronica more than necessary.
-Maybe Adrian continually sought Sarah’s company.
-Veronica finds out about them; Sarah is pregnant; Adrian performs the ultimate philosophical act.
-I still can’t find a good reason why Sarah wants the diary to be given to Tony. We only have two pages of his diary. What was in there? Did Adrian speak of more than friendly feelings toward Tony? Is the diary more about Tony than it is about the owner? Is there something between Sarah and Tony for him to be included in her will? And is the diary really burned?
6.
This deserves a second reading in the way that William Faulkner’s The Sound and the Fury should be reread. I haven’t reread yet since I just read this last night.
November 14th, 2011 at 13:00
Addition:
I just remembered this part while having lunch. The potato salad triggered it. I think Tony is having a difficulty in coming to terms with the past. When he was having a conversation with the social worker, when the social worker was telling the truth about the unstable man, he kept interrupting the conversation with hand cut potatoes. If he really were intent with knowing what happened to Veronica, Adrian, and Sarah, the potatoes should not even be able to steal his attention.
He must be just content with what he has. He must be afraid of hurting himself all over. It must be his instinct for self-preservation.
November 14th, 2011 at 20:09
I’ll ignore the guide questions and just say what I think about the book in general. I’ve not read enough books to be absolutely certain this book isn’t any good so I’m not going to say that, but here goes. (Also I often fear I do not have very good taste in books. I look at my bookshelf sometimes and get all existential about it.)
When Adrian died I didn’t love him enough to feel sorry about it. Ok fine, so he wasn’t Seymour, and maybe that’s not the point. We’re supposed to be able to relate with Tony, and not sure if it’s just me, but I couldn’t.
I read stories like this all the time. Divorced jerks having middle age crisis. Richard Ford wrote about it with a lot less subtlety over a course of 3 books but I liked how he went about it. Amusing, and very self aware, and true. Or in that book/novella called A River Runs Through It. God, what an awful lot of crap about fly fishing. The narrator was supposedly looking back at his life same way that Tony was in this book but I understand that story better, I mean what he was actually saying while going on and on about fly fishing.
Ok, and finally, I’ll compare this with that John Banville novel that also won the Booker Prize – The Sea. They’re similar, but I liked that other book. The author also tells you about his childhood, filters out most of what happened in his life so he can tell you about it, but most specifically he tells you about something that happened to him while he was a kid, at the very last minute, just a plain story no twist or tricks or anything. He tells you about this while casually mentioning the death of his wife and you see him, as a person, like he was right there beside you and at the end of the book I feel like offering this Banville fictional narrator some vodka telling him not too get all worked up about it because this life and all its sadness drives me absolutely nuts too.
November 14th, 2011 at 21:06
1. IT’S NOT ABOUT YOU. Try not to evaluate it in the context of your life.
2. Who says you’re supposed to “relate” to a character? Screw “relatability”. It sells books by making them “friendlier” but it is not a measure of the quality of the work. There is something to be said for strangeness.
3. That’s why he’s an unreliable narrator: he’s not self-aware. If you demand that everything be explained to you clearly and unequivocally you limit the possibilities of literature. This is a book about how we cannot truly know ourselves because memory is mutable. The intent is to show Unknowability. Judge the work on the author’s intent and not your personal expectations.
4. A River Runs Through It is A BOOK ABOUT FLY-FISHING. Complaining about the amount of fly-fishing in it sort of like denouncing Moby Dick for whale-hunting or The Age of Innocence for not having enough poor people in it.
November 15th, 2011 at 00:03
I’m only halfway through the book, but I feel like I should pitch in something since I got my copy from you.
I wonder though–what if Tony was truly self-aware, and that he merely glazed over uncomfortable details of his life? He hints this perhaps when he mentioned that part that it could’ve either been that he broke up with Veronica then they had sex, or they had sex then he broke up with her. From what I’ve read, I could also assume that he demonized Veronica because he really thought Veronica as unreachable, unrelenting. Could he be sour-graping for never really possessing Veronica?
Anything first-person should not be taken as immediately true. Tony never owed us the truth in the first place.
More thoughts: which parts of his life was Tony afraid to divulge in an effort to be peaceable, or cool like his friends? Could it be that they were all drawn to Adrian because Adrian was honest, the way that they weren’t? I guess I’ll find out more when I finally finish the book.
November 15th, 2011 at 00:20
In itself, a placid, undramatic life is nothing to scoff at. Most people live that way, because that’s the only way they know to live life. They go through life’s ‘normal’ progression unquestioningly: they study, work, get married, raise children, retire or work until death. And in the end, they call it (and are convinced of it) a full and fulfilled life. I don’t want to say that they know nothing. Life is so much simpler this way, and they’re lucky to find happiness and contentment in it.
To live otherwise, i.e.to live a fully-engaged life, to serve one’s passions, to seek a deeper and richer experience from life, to search for a burning love, is to invite instability: the peaks of happiness and the valleys of discontent. This requires a certain temperament that has gone through a certain educative process, both from home and from school.
Tony Webster, the narrator of “The Sense of an Ending,” had the background and inclination to live the latter kind of life, but has chosen, out of a “sense of self-preservation,” the former. After school, he went on to do a lifetime of nondescript work, he married a woman with “clear edges,” (i.e. boring), raised a daughter, and then he retired comfortably. Late in the day, the receipt of a strange bequest from a woman he’s met only once decades ago would expose him as a lifelong coward. Afraid of losing, of being hurt, he has lived a life of continual self-effacement and disengagement. He has shunned both deep feeling and deep thinking.
This realization comes too late, of course, and he gets “towards the end of life—no, not life itself, but of something else: the end of any likelihood of change in that life,” where he will continually be haunted by one question: “What else have I done wrong?”
One word from the novel stuck with me: remorse. It feels like a slow but continuous agony, which no amount of atonement will rid, because no atonement is anymore possible. This is Tony’s tragedy, and no, it is not “too grand a word.”
November 15th, 2011 at 02:35
I guess a better way of saying it is that if TSOAE were a person and we were having dinner together, half way thru the meal I will realize this person is very clever, and interesting but you know, empty. And then I will wish that Life hit TSOAE in the head a litter harder, to get him to pay attention, that way he will be deserving of the booker.
This, as opposed to having dinner with other books, like Dubliners, for example, who is very beautiful and also clever, but during the meal I will realize I’m a bit out of my depth and that I have to go out with Dubliners again when I’m a little older, because by then I’m sure I will have already gained the sophistication to appreciate him.
November 15th, 2011 at 10:17
angus25: We remember thinking, “How can you blather about potatoes at a time like this??” And how like real people: shifting their attention to the inconsequential when literal matters of life and death are in their face.
Is it possible that the “damaged” child is his, by Veronica or Sarah? The timing would be right. Recall how quickly he reached the conclusion that Veronica had been “damaged” in childhood.
Good point about the bloody bathwater. He’s remembering something he never saw, and forgetting things that actually happened.
“Unrest” is the word. After finishing the novel we felt unsettled and a little scared—as if we’d seen a horror movie and were convinced that the monsters were lurking around the house.
November 15th, 2011 at 10:47
mcmorco: And the placid, undramatic life is what most of us will have. (And likely what Shakespeare had, which is why we know so little about him—how could he have had the time for personal dramas when he was always writing?)
“Atonement” brings up the McEwan novel, which we recalled after reading the Barnes. That one also has an ending wallop that turns everything we think we know on its head. We also went back to the earlier chapters to see what we’d missed. The difference is that we were complicit: we wanted the lovers to have some kind of happy ending. The author, being god, had the power to give it to us. Fiction is within human control; memory isn’t. What Barnes has done is to simulate memory itself, and memory is murky and infuriating. The approach is not god-like, but human.
We never know what’s happening to us until we get the sense of an ending, and then we look back and impose some kind of order on the mess.
November 15th, 2011 at 10:47
* One of the most fundamental ways in which Tony doesn’t “get it” is that he’s facetious when he needs to be serious and he’s too sensitive when he needs to chill.
* I also wondered why Tony would say that Veronica was “damaged” just because she was complicated about sex. But I can’t say there’s enough clue to support the conjecture that the mentally-challenged Adrian is his.
November 15th, 2011 at 10:50
Evan: The novel is actually a thriller from the POV of a spectacularly dense man.
Noel has an interesting question: At the end, do you still have the urge to read the blasted diary?
November 15th, 2011 at 11:00
mcmorco: Think back to the time they saw the Severn Bore, an event Tony remembers belatedly. The upstream tidal wave is a freakish thing that happens on a regular basis. True, there aren’t enough clues to support the paternity angle, but it makes things more interesting (Because we the readers want things to be more interesting), plus we have Tony’s cluelessness to help us along.
November 15th, 2011 at 12:02
Why had the characters, or at least Tony, glorified Adrian’s suicide? Regardless whether he had sex with his girlfriend’s mother, is there a reason, only Adrian’s brilliant mind could come up with, to be taken as valid and acceptable one for taking his own life. At one point in his life, he was scared, a coward even.
November 15th, 2011 at 13:15
One of the commentors in Peter Stothard’s blog mentioned that Olympia Airlines has a frequent flyer program called “Icarus”. Hilarious!
November 15th, 2011 at 18:16
And I thought I was alone in thinking that TSOAE evoked memories of McEwan’s Atonement, particularly the lines about not being able to atone for one’s sins if one is already a god. This must be at the last page.
What triggered this memory of Atonement is Tony’s rambling on remorse and struggling to revert it to guilt so that he could apologize. Or maybe console himself? Since remorse cannot be reverted (things cannot be undone), could he resort to atoning?
November 15th, 2011 at 19:55
Just finished the book and would like to share my initial impressions.
Is Tony lying or did he just really forget? Is his memory really faulty or that’s just what he’s leading us to believe? He has, after all, asked early in the novel, “How often do we readjust, embellish, make sly cuts?”
By the end of the novel, though, I am more concerned with the ruminations about life that he has brought up and not the veracity of his account. This especially stands out for me:
“We thought we were being mature when we were only being safe. We imagined we were being responsible but we were only being cowardly. What we called realism turned out to be a way of avoiding things rather than facing them.”
While Tony’s narrative may be faulty, he has revealed to us to truths can be really quite unsettling.
November 16th, 2011 at 04:56
1
I agree with Tony that he’s average. He’s more of a liar than a coward. I agree on what you said about telling edited versions of the story of his life so he can live with himself. He’s not letting on very much when he talks about his divorce, falling out with a great love (Veronica) and his somewhat cold relationship with his daughter. He gives piecemeal information about his back story with them. If these people play such a huge part in his life it’s unlikely he’s forgotten about it. Even when he was feeling remorse and some memories came back, I get the feeling that he’s trying to bury other recollections that surfaced. At an old age, he’s in denial of many things hence he could not get past of his ex and feels alone. He’s flighty and as he said “peaceable”. The way he avoids confrontation strikes me as he’s way of avoiding revealing past issues or mistakes he’s made. Medyo kapalmuks for me si Tony nung inisip nya na may gusto pa rin si Veronica sa kanya nung nagkita sila na matanda na pareho. Come on, man! That was pretty delusional. That’s what he gets for lying with himself for so many years. Can you not believe the story teller? I don’t really buy his story about backpacking in the US. Anyone feel the same? Also, I don’t sense the passion when he tells his story about Margaret, leading me to assume he just settled as he fears that no one else might come along.
I guess we’re all insecure in High School, in Tony’s case he never got over it. He’s needy and desires validation from others. Maybe that’s why he doesn’t tell the story as it is.
The part in the drunk letter (60’s version of drunk dial I suppose) reeks of too much projection and resentment. He’s the perverted one, he’s the big bore, and he wants to be in Cambridge like Adrian. As for Adrian, I don’t see anything wrong in being an intellectual snob. However, it’s a big no-no for me to screw your buddy’s ex. Bros before you-know-whats. I have many theories about why he killed himself. I guess some issues are too big or too taboo for his logical brain.
There might be more to Margaret to discover but how can she measure up to the One Great Love? Tony does not remind me of myself but Veronica reminds me of my ex.
Of all the characters it Sarah I’m not so sure of. Is she a bored housewife? Is she competing with her daughter? Did she mean well when she warned Tony? What the hell is that horizontal hand gesture? Is she an unfaithful wife? It was the 60s. Was she one of those who welcomed the progressive take on sex? What was that lodge all about? What’s going on in there? Mrs Ford makes me feel like I have a dirty mind. There are some major issues in that woman.
2
The image that I’m still trying to wipe off my mind is the old man hard on for Veronica. And the let’s-get-back-together geriatric style thoughts he was entertaining. Pretty sad, really.
3
I like this style about the unreliable narrator. Barnes is a master of crafting these dodgy characters. Tony, with all his lying and editing, didn’t really embellish the stories. I don’t know if it’s because of guilt, his style of not going far from the truth so he can easily believe his lies or he’s unimaginative. I started doubting Tony when he did not reveal instantly what he said in the letter. I got the feeling that since he can’t undo it and it was a dumb, crass thing to do, he just buried it and told us a really condensed version of it to get it over and done with.
I like the way the story was presented- fast paced when the main characters were still young, then, slow and blotchy in the latter part.It’s rare to find readable, thought provoking books coming from a narrator you’re doubtful of.
4
Tony will never get closure if he continues to fool himself so that’s all he’s getting. Time has a way on catching up with people.
5
I still can’t make up what could be the most plausible story about Veronica, the will and the two Adrians. I’m left with more questions as I did from the start. I’m most perplexed with the 500 bucks.
6
-Tony discussing the hand cut potato was annoying.
-I found myself fixating on the equation part too much.
-Back in school, they asked Adrian “Maybe your mum has a young lover?” Were the kids right on the money that’s why Adrian killed himself after being a young lover of Mrs Ford?
-Sayang yung itlog tinapon lang.
November 16th, 2011 at 14:05
Here’s what I thought may have happened on first reading:
Adrian’s letter to Tony was an attempt to hide the truth: that he was already having an affair with Veronica’s mom, Sarah, from the start. And also to ensure that Adrian will avoid all future contact with him and Sarah’s family because of the scandal that would ensue. Eventually, they have a baby.
Based on this version, Veronica may never have had a relationship with Tony apart from the crush evident during the picture taking of the four friends.
Here’s what I thought may have happened on second reading and also after a more careful reading of the equation:
Veronica did really have a thing for Adrian (that’s philosophically evident!) based on how she behaved when all four of them where having their pictures taken.
Adrian, perhaps at a problematic point in his relationship with Veronica, follows Tony’s bitter advice to consult Sarah.
At which point, perhaps Sarah seduced Tony.
So Sarah and Tony end up having a baby.
Here’s what I think now: Getting the story right – doesn’t matter. Because whether you get it or not – it doesn’t change the fact that their lives are tragic. And that most of the main characters’ (in the equation) lives have either ended in the real sense or in the symbolic sense.
Thus, the sense of an ending. It’s a story with no survivors.
Some more observations:
Part One ends with Tony Webster concluding that the life he’s led is not half bad. After all, he survived to tell the tale as he puts it – as he compares himself to Adrian Finn.
In Part Two, this conclusion unravels. Tony realizes that while he has lived longer, his life may have ended long before that. In that sense, Adrian may have gotten the better end of the deal by deciding to end his life before he reached that point. Adrian, ever the wiser one, realized much sooner than most that the end of life, as the novel puts it, is not so much the end of life itself but “the end of any likelihood of change in that life”.
In that sense, it’s a very tragic novel. Because when Tony Webster solves the mystery in the end he realizes that “getting it” is too late. Not only is he too late too change anything but, in a manner of speaking, Tony himself has died long ago.
I like how the novel is so consistent at establishing Tony’s character as someone who never gets it. When his ex Margaret tells him the anecdote of a friend of a friend who read her au pair’s diary, Tony makes the same conclusion we would: that the the point of the story was the firing of the au pair. What he doesn’t get then – a foreshadowing – is that the consequence of arriving at “truth” by reading someone’s diary – may not even be worth it. It serves nothing except for sating your curiosity and having done so – you may even be disturbed by what you find out.
I like how Adrian’s character is much like a prophet. He unwittingly predicts his own demise by saying “Eros and Thanatos. Thanatos wins again.” Even his definition of history foretells how his own life will soon be perceived: History (Adrian’s life) is that certainty produced at the point where the imperfection of (Tony’s) memory meet the inadequacies of documentation (Adrian’s diary)
I like how key scenes in which Tony meets up with Veronica happen against a backdrop of wrongness: The Severn Bore not only serves as a metaphor for time being placed in reverse, as Tony notes, it also gives you a sense of “but this is not how things are supposed to be”, Veronica’s mom, Sarah, is not supposed to have an affair with Adrian. Sarah is not supposed to have a child this late in her years.
Then there’s the Wobbly Bridge – so named for a history of unsteadiness. Which makes you question what else is wobbly? Tony’s version of events? Adrian Jr.’s mental health? Sarah’s relationship with Veronica?
I like how Tony’s character keeps apologizing for the wrong things and in the end, when he finally realizes what he really has to be sorry for, he realizes that saying sorry will not mend anything.
Will try to write more if I think of any.
November 16th, 2011 at 14:26
Adrian’s definition of history stood out for me. It reminds me how amazing the human brain is, that it is not just a machine simply saving files of transactions or events. What it chooses to save and how it accounts or interprets the meanings of those events vary from person to person even among those who were parties to or attendees of the same occurrence. Even then, a person’s initial interpretation may change with the addition of new or previously-unknown information. This novel has only served to reinforce my belief that memories are subjective and every person is rewriting his/her own history with each passing minute.
For me the title cannot be more appropriate. The last pages only give us, its readers, a “sense of an ending”. In truth, if you really think about it, Tony’s story is not over. What will his life be like after such earth-shaking revelations? What other scenes or pieces of hidden memory will he be able to unearth later on in his life? How will the revelations further color his present life or his interpretation of his past and those of the other characters? It reminds me of this line from a film I saw once: “We may be through with the past but the past is not yet through with us”.
November 16th, 2011 at 17:50
I think Tony is a liar precisely because he’s a coward. He is afraid of acknowledging his wants, his desires, in fear of being thought as somebody less than his peers. He crafts a history that was average, acceptable—conjuring memories when convenient, or when cornered to admission. He succinctly, perhaps sheepishly, admits it when he said,”How often do we adjust, embellish, make sly cuts? And the longer life goes on, the fewer are those around to challenge our account, to remind us that our life is not our life, merely the story we have told about our life. Told to others, but—mainly—to ourselves.” Here, it is apparent how he justifies his lies.
You’d notice this when he casually makes it seem that his reaction to his friend and ex’s love affair was less bitter than it actually was in the first part, only to remorsefully recognize that his reaction was vitriolic, as evidenced by the letter that had impacted Adrian and Veronica’s lives more than he would’ve cared to admit (or confront) in the first place. He sought approval because he was too cowardly to face his own decisions and his own average life.
Then again, aren’t we all guilty of being selective with what we choose to highlight? Heroes, saints: they’re all made that way, after all. I think that is, as they said in the book, philosophically self-evident, haha.
November 16th, 2011 at 17:52
Then again, is omission automatically a lie, or an act of self-preservation? Aren’t we all programmed to save ourselves from harm, whether that may be a burning house or the burning shame of acknowledging one’s inadequacies? If so, then shall we forgive Tony for preserving himself from his own faults and failures?
November 17th, 2011 at 04:44
I think that maybe some of the commenters before me are young, way too young, to realize how much memory fades as you get on in years. Ever been to your umpteenth class reunion? You will see how some people remember vividly, or not at all. Some things you remember, others haven’t the foggiest.
Tony was not lying. What he was narrating was what he remembered.
You can almost say the first few lines of the book (up to “what you end up remembering isn’t always the same as what you have witnessed”) sums it up.
Look into the Ted Hughes reference: he was married to one of the most famous suicides of all: Sylvia Plath. Supposedly, Syvlia’s mother accompanied them on their honeymoon…Ted Hughes is said to have destroyed the final volume of Plath’s journal….
Dig deeper kids. This might be more fun than you thought it would be.
November 17th, 2011 at 11:54
Wonderful point, Usisera. Let the youth believe in their invincibility—time will kick them in the ass soon enough. Kids, not long from now you may hear yourself think, “I never went out with that one. Absolutely not. I would remember. Did I? Shit.”
In our case though the long-term memory is solid, it’s the short-term that’s getting wonky. We can describe a dinner we went to 15 years ago, but not a conversation we had 3 days ago. Or maybe our brain decided the conversation was too insignificant to move from the short-term to the long-term memory bank.
November 17th, 2011 at 14:15
I agree with Usisera that Tony was not lying. To Tony’s mind, what he was relating was his truthful recollection of the events that transpired.
I must disagree though with the age thing. Mistakes in recollection of past events can happen to anyone regardless of age. Two different people who witnessed the same event will have different stories as to how it went. Differences can range from the most minor of details to more significant aspects such as sequences of action or even the characters involved because the mind is not just a recording machine. I adhere to the belief that the mind chooses the details most significant to its owner, sometimes extending its interpretation of the event to that which supports the individual’s belief system.
November 20th, 2011 at 01:23
Wow intense! Grrabe sila noh? Buti na lang di ako sumali rito, di kakayanin ng Wonder Twin Powers ko to. Wahaha!
November 20th, 2011 at 01:38
I don’t think Tony lied but he certainly created a different version of what transpired between Veronica, Adrian and him. I would say this isn’t necessarily lying unless its deliberate. But then again isn’t there usually a certain degree of awareness, at least initially, when we begin embellishing a story? Isn’t there usually a split second where we would realize that we are giving an inaccurate recounting of events, after which we decide whether to correct or commit to our altered version of the story?
It’s far to convenient to attribute it solely to forgetfulness. Perhaps after constant repetition of his version of the story, Tony simply forgot it isn’t entirely true.
Tony’s memory of Veronica dancing is the scene that stayed the most with me. There is something so sad about the memory itself, as well as the fact that he cannot remember if it actually happened.
November 21st, 2011 at 20:12
Quid est veritas?
Barnes writes so pithily, one can readily quote from any part of the book. The quality of meditation on the book, however, is very ironic. Tony uses philosophers/literature/music to erudite effects when alluding to and debating time, life, and the other Big Questions. But he doesn’t get any of it—what’s happening in (or to) his life.
Tony was neither lying nor telling the truth as adequatio rei et intellectus, truth as we want it—whole, objective, pristine. Simply because this is difficult and requires rigour to arrive at, if not completely impossible. As Old Joe Hunt explained, “historians need to treat a participant’s own explanation of events with a certain scepticism. It is often the statement made with an eye to the future that is the most suspect.” At the risk of sounding like an Epistemology professor: whatever truth we have, that truth is always embedded in our context, culture, habit, attitude, memory, what-have-you. But it is still truth. In addition, how do we know that the truth we have is finally The Truth—whole, objective, pristine? Who determines these criteria?
The image that stayed with me was Sarah’s farewell gesture: I did not quite know how to visualize that horizontal gesture. When Jessica made a suggestion on the paternity of Adrian Junior, I went back to the gesture—Tony’s description of it made me wonder if it was something innocent (a half-hearted goodbye), or something naughty and malicious (and indicated that there was something between Tony and Sarah that Tony was keeping from us).
To say that the readability of the book lies in Barnes’s effortless command of the language is simplistic and lazy. The book’s being judged as readable is actually ambiguous. Its readability is a trick, I should say. It is very easy to read: one can do it in one sitting. It is very easy to read because it reads just like a “simple” memoir, or a telling of things as they are from an individual’s POV, not much metaphor—at the first perusal. After the shock provided by the ending, one finds herself/himself flipping back to the beginning. The fact that one is compelled to do a second reading means the author did not intend it to be “readable”. The book is short but like a haiku, interpretation on what it says can be varied and multiple. It IS a telling of things as they are from an individual’s POV, which says a LOT. Every telling is a telling by someone. Every telling is a telling about that someone (cf. Joan Didion’s “On Keeping a Notebook” in Slouching Towards Bethlehem. She acknowledges that most of the notes/memories in her journals are fictionalizations, embellishments of events she has witnessed/experienced, and whenever she retells an event, other people that were present in the event would often correct her or advise her that that’s not what happened at all.).
What about Colin’s, Alex’s, Veronica’s points of view, or especially Adrian’s? Their versions of the truth? Their sides of the story? Their own metaphors and memories? Even Tony is dubious of his own recounting and interpretation of events, however narrow or wise that interpretation may be. He is honest on this matter as well. As with every narration, we are reading and getting to know Tony, not really what happened. Or we are getting to know what happened under his sight, we are seeing/looking at what happened using his eyes. The problem in every narration, every story like this is that it is the person’s story, the individual’s story, not the whole story (whatever whole means. Does it mean multi-dimensional?). We ask, however, how many versions are there? Do we need to know them all? Why? Will we arrive to the one ideal truth by knowing the other versions?
I wondered at the article used on the title, why it was The Sense, not A Sense (and no, not just because it was culled from Frank Kermode). The story we have is only Tony’s (he repeatedly reminds us it is his story) and so we expect that the sense of the ending is only his sense of it, one sense in five, or six, or a dozen senses and exegeses of the ending. How many endings should there be anyway? As many characters were in the story, as many lives involved in the suicide/geriatric birth that happened? I guess what Barnes is telling us is we cannot fully know The Story, we will always merely have A Story although we will always have The Sense of its Ending, the ending that is given to us, one ending out of five, six, a dozen, a thousand.
I enjoyed the way the novel was very self- and medium-conscious (By the way, is this kind of consciousness in a novel a criteria in meta-fiction? I’m not really a fan of labelling and genre-sorting, it feels like taxonomy. Well, it is taxonomy). Reading the first pages of the book, I was reminded of Virginia Woolf’s injunction (on women) against keeping a diary and too much self-reflection, and Roald Dahl’s “Henry Sugar” (the part where Dahl said that if it were fiction, Henry would see his own artery being clogged as karma for using supernatural powers to gain wampum):
“In a novel, Adrian wouldn’t just have accepted things as they were put to him. What was the point of having a situation worthy of fiction if the protagonists didn’t behave as he would have done in a book? …. Or would that have been less like literature and too much like a kids’ story?”
Barnes used this awareness of the dichotomy between fact and fiction to an effect that contributes to the equivocal readability of his book and makes us read it again. So what do we think of Tony’s story and his sense of an ending? Was Tony really being candid and artless? Is our doubt just the result of our thinking that his memory is getting senile and doddery, or is it precisely because the ending is shocking that we want to think of other possibilities, other truths (his feelings towards Veronica and Margaret and Sarah, Adrian II’s father, Colin’s and Alex’s assessment of their lives, the real attitudes of Brother Jack and Mr Ford)? The novel leaves us many other questions. Tony himself is a question. Again, at the risk of sounding like a philosophy teacher, Man, anyway, is a Question.
Also, it was not only Ian McEwan’s Atonement that slapped me on the nape with cold fingers when I read TSOAE. I would like to end with a quote from another Booker Prize winner, one of my favourite authors:
“The only way you can write the truth is to assume that what you set down will never be read. Not by any other person, and not even by yourself at some later date. Otherwise you begin excusing yourself. You must see the writing as emerging like a long scroll of ink from the index finger of your right hand; you must see your left hand erasing it.
Impossible, of course.”
– The Blind Assassin, Margaret Atwood (who also said that the poet has two hands: the dexter and the sinister)
November 21st, 2011 at 23:21
Sharp, balqis, and well-put.
We might think of this novel as a thriller with as many plot turns as the reader can conceive using the author’s clues, each of them leading not to a definite ending that neatly ties up all the strands of the plot, but only to the sense of an ending—some artificial closure that will allow us to get on with our lives, much like the clueless narrator has managed his.
The word that keeps popping into our heads is “deceive”.
Tony’s memory deceives him, or Tony deceives himself.
Tony’s apparent erudition deceives us into thinking that he possesses knowledge. The elegance of his narration deceives us into believing his account is accurate.
But Tony is a fictional character; the author Barnes deceives us into accepting his reality.
The “readability” of Barnes’s novel deceives us into thinking it is simple.
Fiction deceives us into thinking it is truth.
We read fiction in order to be deceived.