The Sense of an Ending by Julian Barnes
Hi y’all!
In case you forgot, this is BOOK NOTES, coming at you a week late because I’m in crunch time at work. Whoops!
I first read The Sense of an Ending by Julian Barnes when I was seventeen or eighteen. It was either the summer before my senior year of high school or the summer before my freshman year of college. I’m not sure, I don’t remember, and it probably doesn’t matter. At the time, I loved it. I recommended it to my mom’s book club, and it was a huge hit. When I picked it up again this week, nearly a decade later, I only remembered a vague outline of plot and mood. My first read influenced my recent read very little—except that the copy I read from was the same copy I read at 17-or-18, full of my curly Catholic school girl cursive (decidedly neater than my now rather spikey script).
It’s funny rereading my almost decade-old annotations in a book about memory. The Sense of an Ending is narrated by 60-year-old Tony. In the first half of the book, Tony reflects on his adolescent friendship with Adrian. Adrian was a friend that Tony admired for his intelligence, logic, and sense of morality. They had a falling out after Adrian began to date Tony’s ex-girlfriend Veronica, and shortly thereafter, Adrian died by suicide. Tony knows that the two incidents can’t be related; Adrian’s suicide note makes it clear that his death was a rational decision.
The second half of the book begins in the present, forty years later, as Tony receives a letter informing him that he is named in Veronica’s mother’s will. She has left him Adrian’s diary. Why Veronica’s mother owned Adrian’s diary, why she left it to Tony, and the diary’s contents are all a mystery, as Veronica refuses to hand the diary over. Despite all the decades that have passed, Tony is sucked into the past and back into Veronica’s orbit.
What follows is an interrogation of memory—what we remember, how we remember it, whether the distance of time allows us to see things more clearly, or if it adds another veil.
Adult Tony reflects on his adolescence with tones of amused condescension. He’s not entirely unsympathetic to his younger self; he knows he was a bit of fool, in the way all teenagers are. In the first half of the book, he looks back at his youthful emotions without summoning or indulging in them.
In the second half of the book though, he begins to note a certain longing for the emotional highs and lows of his youth:
But I’ve been turning over in my mind the question of nostalgia, and whether I suffer from it. I certainly don’t get soggy at the memory of some childhood knickknack; nor do I want to deceive myself sentimentally about something that wasn’t even true at the time—love of the old school, and so on. But if nostalgia means the powerful recollection of strong emotions—and a regret that such feelings are no longer present in our lives—then I plead guilty. ...And if we’re talking about strong feelings that will ever come again, I suppose it’s possible to be nostalgic about remembered pain, as well as remembered pleasure.
But even in his adolescence, he longed for strong emotions that he wasn’t able to access:
This was another of our fears: that Life wouldn’t turn out to be like Literature. Look at our parents—were they the stuff of Literature? At best, they might aspire to the condition of onlookers and bystanders, part of a social backdrop against which real, true, important things could happen. Like what? The things Literature was all about: love, sex, morality, friendship, happiness, suffering, betrayal, adultery, good and evil, heroes and villains, guilt and innocence, ambition, power, justice, revolution, war, fathers and sons, mothers and daughters, the individual against society, success and failure, murder, suicide, death, God. ...Real literature was about psychological, emotional and social truth as demonstrated by the character developed over time.
I mean, I get it. That desire for strong emotions—it’s what makes sad songs fun to listen to, even when you’re happy. It’s fun to indulge in emotion sometimes. In some ways, this desire for emotions that mirror that of literature is the cousin of what I wrote about in an earlier blog post, but here focused squarely on the internal.
Large emotions are legible, mostly; or at least, large emotions often allow us to over to overlook the smaller, shiftier emotions that are harder to interpret. Being righteously angry about a breakup allows you to forget little crackling feelings of guilt; being overwhelmed by love might allow you to ignore twinges of uncertainty.
Admittedly, as a 26-year-old, I’m probably not the most qualified to judge whether or not it’s true that your emotions (or emotional threshold) becomes flattened with time. My guess would be that no, you don’t loose the ability to have these strong feelings, but rather, you become more aware of their fleeting quality. I’m sad, yes, but I’ll be okay. I’m happy, yes, but tomorrow I have to go to work. I think there’s also something to be said about the novelty of these emotions wearing off, something that Fitzgerald phrased quite nicely in This Side of Paradise:
Youth is like having a big plate of candy. Sentimentalists think they want to be in the pure, simple state they were in before they ate the candy. They don't. They just want the fun of eating it all over again. The matron doesn't want to repeat her girlhood - she wants to repeat her honeymoon. I don't want to repeat my innocence. I want the pleasure of losing it again.
This last line stuck with me even when I was seventeen, when I was in the middle of losing my innocence, though at the time I considered myself very mature and worldly and thought that I had shrugged off my innocence with my first illicit vodka-Malibu-Sprite.
In The Sense of an Ending, young Tony actually did have these wild, life-changing emotions that he so desired, he just didn’t remember them clearly—or at least, let their memory soften with time, because the emotions weren’t that flattering.
Both young Tony and adult Tony didn’t actually want the sweeping emotions of literature—he already had them at both stages in his life. He wanted those emotions to conform to a clearer narrative arc. He wanted to know how the story ended, the resolution that comes after the big emotions. He didn’t realize he was still in the middle of it all.
When you're young - when I was young - you want your emotions to be like the ones you read about in books. You want them to overturn your life, create and define a new reality.
The narrativizing comes later.
How often do we tell our own life story? 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.
Common sense would tell you that time does a little of both clarifying and mystifying. In The Sense of an Ending, time mostly obscures. Tony remembers the outlines of his youth, but he remembers it in ways that soften his own mistakes and cruelty.
Towards the beginning of the book, Tony and Adrian are in a history class, and their teacher asks them whether or not the Serbian gunman who killed Franz Ferdinand was to blame for WWI. Half the class says yes, and lays individual responsibility squarely on his shoulders; half the class says no, and blames “historical forces;” a small few claim it’s all chance and chaos and there’s no responsibility to be assigned at all. Adrian finally speaks up:
Isn’t the whole business of ascribing responsibility a kind of cop-out? We want to blame an individual so that everyone else is exculpated. Or we blame a historical process as a way of exonerating individuals. Or it’s all anarchic chaos, with the same consequence. It seems to me that there is—was—a chain of individual responsibilities, all of which were necessary, but not so long a chain that everybody can simply blame everyone else.
As is probably blindingly obvious, any scene in a classroom that lingers too long on a Big Question (and various answers to it) will almost definitely tell you what the book is About. To me, it’s a little bit of a lazy construction, but Barnes is such an elegant writer, that he gets away with it. It feels natural.
So: The Sense of an Ending is all about responsibility and where we lay the blame. Throughout the novel, Tony finally begins to understand exactly where in the chain his link lies.
No reader will expect which of Tony’s actions will be the “catalyst” for Adrian’s suicide. It’s a very small action. Without spoiling too much, I will say that I found it to be a rather cheap twist—Tony is the metaphorical butterfly flapping its wings blithely, stirring up tornadoes a continent away.
His much larger fault (to me, at least) is evident immediately—Tony cares very little for other people. He is unable to empathize with anyone. He idolizes Adrian so completely that he is unable to see his humanity. To Tony, women (including his daughter) are only useful in relationship to himself. He’s a misogynist in ways that I frankly find really boring to spend much time writing about.
Tony is callous and selfish; and the book doesn't entirely let him off the hook for this. But, in locating one specific and rather minor action as his ultimate sin, Tony is able to ignore the larger impact that he has on others.
In many ways, the structure of The Sense of an Ending reminds me of Trust Exercise. The past arrives in the present as a sudden intrusion that revises the present understanding of the past (in both cases, the first half of the book). In both cases, the past come in the form of another character, another perspective, but the distance in time between the first and second narrative matters too—because this intrusion doesn’t just change the present, it changes the way in which the protagonist (and reader) must understand the past. It retroactively changes the past narrative, which the protagonist must confront in the present.
It’s a fairly simple idea, and it has been done loads of times—see A Christmas Carol. I wonder how often it happens IRL. How often does the past come knocking on your door? In our current moment, it actually seems pretty frequent: we all watched Brett Kavanaugh’s Senate hearing regarding Christine Blasey Ford’s allegations of a decades-old sexual assault, we see celebrities “canceled” for racist tweets from years ago. I wonder if, like Tony, these people come to regret the specific actions that get them canceled (when the acknowledge these actions at all), or, if, unlike Tony, they begin to recognize and regret the pattern of behaviors and beliefs that led them to take these actions.
I keep a list of every book I read, and the date that I finished it, something I somehow forgot till the end of this review, even though I’ve kept this list for over ten years now. So I looked up when I finished The Sense of an Ending. I was seventeen, almost eighteen, headed into my senior year of high school. By the next summer, I would feel like a totally different person, more confident in myself and more trusting of other people. What I can tell you about the summer before my senior year: I was elated, I was miserable, I was nervous, I was convinced of my own singular genius and I was terrified that I was the dumbest, plainest girl on the block. I was spending my evenings lying on my floor listening to “Anthems for a Seventeen Year Old Girl” and fantasizing of a life like the ones I saw in the movies. I was working at a Pinkberry frozen yoghurt store. I was still dating my first boyfriend, but I wasn’t happy, was a few weeks away from dumping him, quickly getting back together, and then getting immediately dumped myself. I see all of that in the truly nonsense notes I made in the margins of the book. I was so angry. I was so pretentious. I see someone fumbling with competing ideas of herself, testing out who she wants to be. I see myself hoping to sound smart to some future reader of the book.
But I assumed that future reader would be someone else, a friend to whom I would lend the book, a friend who would be awed by my precocious insights. I don’t think I thought I would read this book ten years later, that I would scribble under my 17-year-old script, “WHAT was I thinking? What does this mean?”
Maybe I’m looking back at my past like Tony did—amused, condescending, ultimately forgiving. The Sense of an Ending would tell you that to look back and make excuses for your adolescent (or past) self is to forget your own sins, to absolve yourself by way of willful ignorance. To think, “I was foolish and naive” is to forget how you were cruel. To an extent, I agree.
But I’m not willing to condemn my seventeen-year-old self. I’m not willing to condemn any seventeen-year-old, really. I think another way of reading The Sense of an Ending would tell you that you can extend empathy to your younger self, but certainly no more—in fact, probably much less—than you are willing to extend to others.
If you want to read The Sense of an Ending, you can purchase it through my Bookshop link, and I’ll get a small commission (more info here). We can chat about it in the comments or you can shoot me an email: booknotesblog@gmail.com
xoxo
Book Notes
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