In Nothing to Be Frightened Of, his family memoir cum meditation on mortality, Julian Barnes admits that he and his brother disagree about many details of their childhood. His brother, a philosopher, maintains that memories are so often false that they cannot be trusted without independent verification. “I am more trusting, or self-deluding,” writes Barnes, “so shall continue as if all my memories are true.”
The narrator of his Booker longlisted new novella has always made that same reasonable assumption, but the act of revisiting his past in later life challenges his core beliefs about causation, responsibility and the very chain of events that make up his sense of self. This concise yet open-ended book accepts the novelistic challenge of an aside in Nothing to Be Frightened Of: “We talk about our memories, but should perhaps talk more about our forgettings, even if that is a more difficult – or logically impossible – feat.”
Like so many of Barnes’s narrators, Tony Webster is resigned to his ordinariness; even satisfied with it, in a bloody-minded way. In one light, his life has been a success: a career followed by comfortable retirement, an amiable marriage followed by amicable divorce, a child seen safely into her own domestic security. On harsher inspection, “I had wanted life not to bother me too much, and succeeded – and how pitiful that was.” Barnes is brutally incisive on the diminishments of age: now that the sense of his own ending is coming into focus, Tony apprehends that “the purpose of life is to reconcile us to its eventual loss”, that he has already experienced the first death: that of the possibility of change.
But like all of us, he has carried his youth inside him into adulthood, fixed in vivid memory. Looming largest in his personal mythology is his brilliant, tragic, Camus-reading schoolfriend Adrian (another echo ofNothing to Be Frightened Of here: in that book Barnes remembers a similar friend by the fitting but unlikely name of Alex Brilliant). It is a solicitor’s letter informing him that, 40 years on, he has been left Adrian’s diary in a will, that sets Tony to examining what he thinks his life has been.
The novella divides into two parts, the first being Tony’s memoir of “book-hungry, sex-hungry” sixth form days, and the painful failure of his first relationship at university, with the spiky, enigmatic Veronica. It’s a lightly sketched portrait of awkwardness and repression at a time when yes, it was the 60s, “but only for some people, only in certain parts of the country”. In one of the book’s many slow-rumbling ironies, the second section undermines the veracity of these expertly drawn memories, as Tony reopens his relationship with Veronica, a woman he had previously edited out of his life story.
It was a “slightly odd thing”, he cautiously admits, to pretend to his ex-wife when they first met that Veronica had never existed (and then later give such a one-sided account of her that she’s known within their marriage as “The Fruitcake”). Barnes builds a powerful atmosphere of shame and silence around the past as Tony tries to track down the elusive diary, which promises, as missing diaries tend to do, some revelation or closure. In a book obsessed with evidence and documentation – verification for unreliable, subjective memory – the most powerful depth charge turns out to be something forgotten yet irrefutable that Tony has kept from himself for 40 years. With it Barnes puts the rest of the narrative, and his unreliable yet sincere narrator, tantalisingly into doubt.
There’s the atmosphere of a Roald Dahl short story to Tony’s quest; the sense that, with enigmatic emails and mysterious meetings in the Oxford Street John Lewis brasserie, he is somehow being played or manipulated by others. “You don’t get it. You never did,” Veronica tells him repeatedly. A secret permeates the text, heavily withheld. But this schematic element pales beside the emotional force of Tony’s re-evaluation of the past, his rush of new memories in response to fresh perspectives, and the unsettling sense of the limits of self-knowledge. As ever, Barnes excels at colouring everyday reality with his narrator’s unique subjectivity, without sacrificing any of its vivid precision: only he could invest a discussion about hand-cut chips in a gastropub with so much wry poignancy.
With its patterns and repetitions, scrutinising its own workings from every possible angle, the novella becomes a highly wrought meditation on ageing, memory and regret. But 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.
review by Anita Brookner in The Telegraph 25 Jul 2011
Memory, individual rather than collective, accounts for who we are and what we have become. And early memory is particularly valuable, though it can be misconstrued. Its influence can persist throughout adult life, though what is cause and what effect may be difficult to judge. In this short but compelling novel Julian Barnes tracks the origin of one particular memory through a long and apparently uneventful life towards an explanation that leaves traces of unease that are difficult to dismiss.
The facts are quite simple. Three school-friends, of whom the narrator, Tony Webster, is one, are joined by a fourth, Adrian Finn, who is much cleverer than any of them. They age and lose contact with one another. But Webster, eventually married and divorced, cannot rid himself of the memory of his former girlfriend, Veronica, at whose family home he once spent a weekend. At the time he had felt uncomfortable, socially inferior, and he was hardly surprised when the enigmatic Veronica took up with the more prestigious Adrian. His early misconception hardens imperceptibly into a mystery that is exacerbated when he learns of Adrian’s suicide. Nor can he understand why Veronica’s mother should leave him a small legacy and the news that she possesses Adrian’s diary.
These facts throw into relief his inability to reconstruct his relations with either Adrian or Veronica. What remains in his memory is the discomfort he felt on that weekend, a discomfort he cannot explain even at an advanced age. The clue might lie in the diary, but attempts to get hold of it are unavailing. He is up against an initial misalliance to which others are being added, containing the same characters but no further explanation.
Webster’s attempts to resolve this enigma form the bulk of this clever novel, in the course of which it becomes clear that the character of Veronica is pivotal. Even her random impulses, to which Webster had become accustomed, seem opaque. The explanation, when it comes, is so fortuitous that it throws into doubt that early unease and what Webster had made of it. The unease had been, and had remained, authentic. This is a fact to which others are gradually added.
Going back in his mind, Webster unearths another memory of that uncomfortable weekend: the odd kindness of Veronica’s mother and her eventual legacy. His reading of the incident had been inconclusive: later reconstructions supply more clues. Finally he accepts an alternative version, which turns out to be the correct one, though it is a betrayal of all concerned.
review by Kirsten Alexander from ABC Bookshow 5 September 2011
English novelist Julian Barnes has written a slip of a new book, a mere 150 pages populated by a small handful of characters. But his novella The Sense of an Ending punches well above its size, and has deservedly been longlisted for the Booker Prize. With brevity and restraint, Barnes addresses some of life’s most significant questions: Can you trust your memories? Have you intentionally forgotten parts of your own past? What will you regret?
The story is narrated by Tony Webster, a man in his sixties looking back on his rather ordinary life. While he is stoic about his lot, he says: ‘I had wanted life not to bother me too much, and succeeded — and how pitiful that was.’ Tony married, had a daughter, divorced, worked as an arts administrator and then retired. ‘And,’ he says, ‘ that’s a life, isn’t it?’ He needn’t have worried too much. Life soon does bother Tony Webster, and offers him an intriguing mystery to solve.
The first part of the story is set in England in the 1960s, though it may as well have been the 1950s since, as Tony explains, it was the Swinging Sixties ‘only for some people, only in certain parts of the country.’ But within Tony’s small group of school friends there is certainly drama and change, amplified when they welcome into their midst a smart, serious boy called Adrian Finn. Tony is in awe of Adrian and declares they will be friends forever.
However, he does not anticipate that Adrian will take up with his rather poisonous ex-girlfriend Veronica Ford while they are all at university, albeit different universities. Tony is furious about this development and, feeling bewildered and betrayed, cuts off contact with the pair. A few months later, Adrian commits suicide. This string of events will affect Tony for the rest of his life.
In the second part of the book, Tony’s quiet retirement years are rocked when he is bequeathed Adrian’s diary by Veronica’s mother. He’s shocked to learn the diary had, in fact, been left to him in Adrian’s suicide note decades ago but Veronica had chosen not to pass it on. Why, we wonder, is the diary with Veronica’s mother? And why has she left it to Tony now? Tony realises Adrian had a secret, one that may have driven him to his death, and he becomes fixated on learning what it was. He begins by trawling through his own memories for clues about what Adrian may have written, unsettling himself and us in the process.
Of course, secrets have a way of making themselves known one way or another. And when we do eventually learn Adrian’s dark story we have to re-evaluate all of the characters in the book. However suspenseful the story is, though, at its core is a profound rumination about memory, perspective, and the fictions we craft out of our own lives. The Sense of an Ending is the work of a strong and assured writer. It may not warm your heart but it might make you wonder about your own life and memories. For that alone, it’s worth reading.
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