Zeitgeisty reading? - "A Sense of an Ending" by Julian Barnes

I feel a strong sense of guilt about this book, which is perhaps I haven't got round to reviewing it before completing the next book (following review). This is a slim volume, barely 160 pages in its hardback manifestation, and should be one of those novels (some have even called it a "novella") which you digest quickly in satisfying chunks. The guilt comes from the fact I read it in an itsy-bitsy kind of way, distractedly, and now I can't work out if that is entirely my fault, or has something to do with the book itself. 

Julian Barnes is one of those names for me which almost automatically implies purchase - though perversely I have never read his early glory work "Flaubert's Parrot" - ever since in 1990 I came across the fantastic History of the World in 10 1/2 Chapters, a work which still provokes in me a precise memory of the place, time, weather of when I read it. So it now bothers me that I perhaps did not do his latest book - shortlisted, albeit slightly controversially, for the Booker no less - complete justice in my reading of it. 

To make matters worse, A Sense of an Ending is a deliberately slippery narrative, about the fallibility of memory and the unreliability of the stories of our lives we construct for ourselves. You need your wits about you here to grasp the revelations which unlock the secrets both of the storyline and of what Barnes is trying to say.

Anyway, after all the health warnings about the credibility of your reviewer, what can I say about this book? Well, first that you're immediately in the presence of a true writer here. Barnes constructs situations and characters superbly well with a powerful economy of language. The central character is utterly credible and comprehensible, albeit not necessarily admirable, and the world he inhabits instantly familiar - at least to the middle-class British audience who I would assume to be the readership of this novel. The power of the writing in this sense struck me with unusual force on this occasion thanks to the fact that, on the evening I finished the book, I almost immediately picked up the its successor on the bedside table and, yes, descended to an entirely different level of literature (of which more in the next review).

The story itself is impregnated, as its title warns you, with a sense of impending ends, of mortality, though not through any explicit preoccupation with coming death, rather through the sense of the importance of properly understanding a personal past before it is too late. The aging central character is a decidedly ordinary, inoffensive bloke, who has, in general, lived a ordinary, inoffensive life. Barnes is not some Sturm und Drang novelist with an unnecessary problem with ordinariness as such, but does seek to undermine the complacency with which the narrative of an ordinary life can be constructed. 

The plot revolves around the fate of a youthful friend of the narrator, the boy, then student, who was unusually and precociously brilliant, destined for great things, who later "steals" the narrator's (by then already) former girlfriend, marries her and not long afterwards unexpectedly commits suicide, an act interpreted by all his friends as some sort of existentially courageous and rigorously philosophical act. The spark for the narrator to re-examine this period, now some thirty years in the past, is the discovery that his former girlfriend's mother, yes, mother, has bequeathed him his old friend's diary in her will. This is an examination which is destined to reveal to him the faultiness of his own memories, perceptions and interpretations of fundamental episodes of his own life, with the key revelation coming in the very last pages of the book, in one of those moments which makes you want simply to start the book again and read it in the light of this new knowledge. Something I didn't actually do, of course…

Whence we return to the original issue, why did this book not "grab" me. It is superbly written, well-constructed, conveys atmosphere superbly, has a clever and important theme… However, somehow, perhaps what was missing, at least for me, was a level of emotional engagement, such as that generated in another very English, subtle, writerly (and similarly short) recent book, Chesil Beach.

But, as I say, this is an issue I may need to attribute to my own distractedness, in which case I am certainly not going to discourage anyone from reading this book. On the contrary, I believe it deserves to be read, and would really like to hear what people think about it.

Distractedly read, deserving better.