And the winner is…

Memory is fallible. We can ameliorate the past and absolve ourselves of responsibility for the actions of our younger selves by remembering this detail instead of that. ‘History is the lies of the victors’, but it is also ‘the self-delusions of the defeated’. This is the lesson learned late in life by Tony Webster, the narrator of Julian Barnes’ newly-anointed Booker Prize-winning novel The Sense of an Ending.

Tony has lived his uneventful life and is now divorced and retired. In his youthful past dwells his old girlfriend, the enigmatic and difficult Veronica, and his clever serious friend, Adrian, to whom Veronica’s affections turn after her sexually and emotionally uncomfortable relationship with Tony ends. Tony cannot forgive his friend’s involvement with his ex-girlfriend and writes a scathing letter to Adrian renouncing him and wishing ill on his and Veronica’s fledgling romance. Around a year later, Adrian kills himself.

A tidy suicide, Tony has had no reason to doubt its professed philosophical causes for the forty years since it happened. That is, until he receives a solicitor’s letter informing him that Veronica’s mother has died and has bequeathed to him a small sum of money and Adrian’s diary in her will. But as the diary is in Veronica’s unyielding possession, Tony must get in touch with his erstwhile lover to claim what is his. At first Veronica sends him only a photocopy of a page from the diary that ends tantalisingly with a sentence cut off before its end, hinting at the idea that Tony had a greater impact on Adrian’s life than he had realised. Then she sends him a photocopy of the letter he had sent to Adrian forty years earlier. Having glossed over the insensitivities of his youth, Tony does not recognise himself in the letter, unable to imagine that he was ever capable of such spite. And so his memories begin to take on different shades, appearing more and more imperfect, the product of living a life he has allowed to ‘happen’ to him, a life over which he has not tried to take a great amount of control, or a great amount of responsibility.

Tony’s tale is told in precise and graceful prose. Barnes writes just as much as needs to be written to create a brooding atmosphere and a protagonist who comes across as an unreliable witness to his own life. The conversations that take place between Tony and Margaret, his ex-wife, about Veronica, during which Margaret consistently refers to Veronica as ‘the Fruitcake’, give us a hint as to what sort of narrator Tony is when telling stories about his past. His tactics are disconcertingly familiar: putting emphasis on the offences of the other party while downplaying his own wrongdoings. In reliving his past in this skewed way, Tony creates a myth about himself that he comes to think of as reality.

But even as fragments of truth begin to surface as Tony re-examines his memories and we discover that he was once capable of a malice that even he has by now forgotten, it is difficult to think too ill of him. That he didn’t foresee the potential repercussions of his letter to Adrian isn’t surprising, and this makes the belated revelation of its impact all the more shocking. Herein lies the power of this quiet, acute novel: how much can the careless actions of youth affect events within you and around you? ‘How far,’ as Adrian wonders in the pages of his diary, ‘do the limits of responsibility extend?’

The ostensible issue that Barnes deals with in The Sense of an Ending is the fallibility of memory, the problem of the little untruths we tell ourselves to make life easier. But it goes much deeper than this, down to the bone, to feelings of guilt about the past and worse, remorse, and the pain of knowing that it is too late to make amends.

c.a.w.hamlett@warwick.ac.uk