Library's review
But time … how time first grounds us and then confounds us. We thought we were being mature when we were only being safe. We imagined we were being responsible but were only being cowardly. What we called realism turned out to be a way of avoiding things rather than facing them. Time … give us enough time and our best-supported decisions will seem wobbly, our certainties whimsical.
At its heart, The Sense of an Ending seems to be all about time, and especially memory, and how the former can distort the latter without our even being quite aware of it. The character Tony narrates the entire novel putting himself at the center of the story, as we all do when we are the one doing the telling. It is only in the closing pages that Barnes tilts the story on its side, and we along with Tony see that the real story is not his to tell, after all.
As I've thought through the book while writing this review, I've come to realize I actually liked it quite a lot. Which brings me back to the question: If I had simply rated this book straight after reading it, would it still have gotten 4½ stars? I think perhaps not. It is deceptively slender in pages, which is not to be confused with being slight in stature. Barnes does his readers the favor of not spelling out every little detail, and there are still things that I'm not sure about (why did Veronica's mum leave Tony that £500?) It may not wrap everything up neatly in a little bow, but The Sense of an Ending is a book that rewards careful reading and contemplation.
Genres
Collection
Description
Fiction. Literature. HTML:Winner of the 2011 Man Booker Prize By an acclaimed writer at the height of his powers, The Sense of an Ending extends a streak of extraordinary books that began with the best-selling Arthur & George and continued with Nothing to Be Frightened Of and, most recently, Pulse. This intense new novel follows a middle-aged man as he contends with a past he has never much thought about�until his closest childhood friends return with a vengeance, one of them from the grave, another maddeningly present. Tony Webster thought he�d left all this behind as he built a life for himself, and by now his marriage and family and career have fallen into an amicable divorce and retirement. But he is then presented with a mysterious legacy that obliges him to reconsider a variety of things he thought he�d understood all along, and to revise his estimation of his own nature and place in the world. A novel so compelling that it begs to be read in a single sitting, with stunning psychological and emotional depth and sophistication, The Sense of an Ending is a brilliant new chapter in Julian Barnes�s oeuvre.… (more)