The Sense of an Ending by Julian Barnes
My rating: 4 of 5 stars
Is ‘old man finds out the truth about his past’ a genre now? I only ask because I recently read The Sea by John Banville and it’s the same.
The Sense of an Ending is well-constructed. There are two big revelations which hit one after the other like a one-two punch. And they have behind them the whole force and weight of a novel’s-worth of empathy generation. Schoolyard memories; misunderstood genius; suicide; lust.
It’s a plot that carries you along. But looking back, it doesn’t hold together as well as it feels while you’re reading. This is because most of the suspense comes from one character withholding information. You assume that something is forcing her to be mysterious. But it turns out not to be so. She could have resolved all the suspense of the whole novel in a single sentence, if she had felt like it.
So it ends up as a book-length exploration of how the protagonist is insensitive and the antagonist is uncommunicative, with neither of those qualities very well explored.
It also drags a bit. The protagonist’s relationship with his ex-wife isn’t very germane to the plot. So all the pages spent on her feel boring.
On the other hand, it does a good job of following the ‘necessary but unguessable’ rule. You ought to be unable to see the end coming. But you should also realize, once you get there, that no other explanation fits all the facts. The end of this novel is exactly like that. It’s a really neat moment of revelation, exactly what a good tragedy or mystery novel should do.
And there’s a lot of poignancy in the belated realization of his own cruelty to his friend. When he gets his decades-old letter back and sees how evil he had been.
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