The Sense of an Ending: Julian Barnes

Barnes, Julian

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0099564971 ISBN 13: 9780099564973

Publisher: Vintage, 2012

Winner of the Man Booker Prize for Fiction in 2011

Tony Webster and his clique first met Adrian Finn at school. Sex-hungry and book-hungry, they would navigate the girl-less sixth form together, trading in affectations, in-jokes, rumour and wit. Maybe Adrian was a little more serious than the others, certainly more intelligent, but they all swore to stay friends for life.

Now Tony is retired. He's had a career and a single marriage, a calm divorce. He's certainly never tried to hurt anybody. Memory, though, is imperfect. It can always throw up surprises, as a lawyer's letter is about to prove.

Review:

`compelling...Its effect is disturbing - all the more so for being written with Barnes's habitual lucidity. His reputation will surely be enhanced by this book. Do not be misled by its brevity. Its mystery is as deeply embedded as the most archaic of memories' --The Daily Telegraph

`A dexterously crafted narrative of unlooked-for consequences...polished phrasings, elegant verbal exactness and epigrammatic perceptions embellish his sombre story. Uncovering, link by link, and appalling chain reaction of briefly wished-for revenge, almost accidental damage, and remorse that agonisingly bites after most of a lifetime, it's a harsh tale rich in human resonances.' --The Times

"Cleverly, Barnes compresses a story with long temporal sweep into a scant 150 pages. (You can imagine a younger or a less confident author taking about three times as long to make the same points.) The cleverness resides not only in the way he has caught just how second-rate Webster's mind is without driving the reader to tears of boredom but in the way he has effectively doubled the length of the book by giving us a final revelation that obliges us to reread it. Without overstating his case in the slightest, Barnes's story is a meditation on the unreliability and falsity of memory; on not getting it the first time round - and possibly not even the second, either. Barnes's revelation is richly ambiguous. " --The Evening Standard

`Julian Barnes may well have written his best novel, he has certainly told a wonderful story that is all too human and all so real' --Irish Times, Eileen Battersby

Book of the week: `Written in beautifully cadenced prose, it is a mature writer's reflections on love and marriage... on family and friendship, on work and death.' --Time Out (London)

`His best attempt yet at proving that his creative urges only seem contradictory...is as satisfying as anything he's written.' --Daily Express

`A fascinating sketch of an unglamorous and rarely-mined vein of middle-class life.' --Daily Mail

`What is so impressive in Barnes's fiction is his ability to evoke the chaos and vulnerability that beleaguer human life, while remaining calm and lucid in the face of both. He seems a modern-day Stoic.' --The Times

`It gives as much resonance to what is unknown and unspoken - lost to memory as it does to the engine of its own plot. Fiction, Barnes writes in Nothing to be frightened of, "wants to tell all stories, in all their contrariness, contradiction and irresolvability". The Sense of an Ending honours that impossible desire in a way that is novel, fertile and memorable.' --Guardian

`Deservedly longlisted for the Man Booker prize, this is a very fine book, skilfully plotted, boldly concieved, full of bleak insight into the questions of ageing and memory, and producing a very real kick - or peripatetic - at its end. As Kermode wrote: "At some very low level we all share certain fictions about time, and they testify to the continuity of what is called human nature..." Barnes has achieved, in this shortish account of a not very attractive man, something of universal importance.' --Observer

`Its brevity, however, in no way compromises its intensity - every word has its part to play; with great but invisible skill Barnes squeezes into it not just a sense of the infinite complexity of the human heart but the damage the wrong permutations can cause when combined' --Financial Times

`quietly mesmerising...A slow burn, measured but suspenseful, this compact novel makes every slyly crafted sentence count...the concluding scenes grip like a thriller - a whodunit of memory and morality, and one which detonates a minor, private apocalypse' --Independent

--New Yorker

A dexterously crafted narrative of unlooked-for consequences, the book increasingly takes on the momentum of a taut horror tale: a 21st century successor to the great suspense novellas of masters such as Henry James and Robert Louis Stevenson... A harsh tale rich in humane resonances --Sunday Times

Book Description:

Winner of the Man Booker Prize for Fiction in 2011 and a Sunday Times bestseller - this is a brilliant novel from a writer at the very height of his powers