The Sense of an Ending by Julian Barnes

The story of a man coming to terms with the mutable past, Julian Barnes’s new novel is laced with his trademark precision, dexterity and insight. It is the work of one of the world’s most distinguished writers.

Tony Webster and his clique first met Adrian Finn at school. Sex-hungry and book-hungry, they navigated the girl drought of gawky adolescence together, trading in affectations, in-jokes, rumour and wit. Maybe Adrian was a little more serious than the others, certainly more intelligent, but they swore to stay friends forever. Until Adrian’s life took a turn into tragedy, and all of them, especially Tony, moved on and did their best to forget.

Now Tony is in middle age. He’s had a career and a marriage, a calm divorce. He gets along nicely, he thinks, with his one child, a daughter, and even with his ex-wife. 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. The unexpected bequest conveyed by that letter leads Tony on a dogged search through a past suddenly turned murky. And how do you carry on, contentedly, when events conspire to upset all your vaunted truths?

Originally, this was a book group recommendation from another group and I chose this book on that basis. To be honest I wasn’t too keen at first glance but, as always, book group is for trying out books that we normally wouldn’t read – so I got stuck in.

This was one of the shortest books I have read in a while, yet it was brimming with wit, humour and depth. It is a true master of the English language who can fit so much into so few pages and Julian Barnes does this perfectly. The story is quite snappy and does tend to skip large chunks of our protagonists life, but it is easy enough to follow (even if I did have to get the dictionary out every now and then!) and it had me laughing out loud on more than one occasion. It was great to find that the rest of the group also found the book to be both a pleasurable and entertaining read.

Admittedly, it did seem to have a bit of a slow start, but once you were familiar with the pace and dynamics of the story you found it very hard to put down and could see why it ended up winning the Man Booker Prize. The story itself seems simple enough, yet the ending is complex and certainly a bit of a shocker that also leaves you with a few questions of your own. Although Barnes writes with depth and originality it was the humour that did it for me – just the simplicity of some of the comments made by Tony (our protagonist) rang very true and made it easier for the reader to understand and relate to his feelings and situations.

The whole group seemed to find this a book worth reading and I whole heartedly recommend anyone wanting to read something that bit different to give this a try. It was my first attempt at reading something by Julian Barnes and I shall certainly be looking at reading more of his work.