Genre Fiction
![Julian Barnes - [object Object] author](https://res.cloudinary.com/readsomnia/image/upload/authors/a_B000APWCZG.jpg)
The Sense of an Ending
This Man Booker Prize–winning novel is now a major motion picture.
A novel so compelling that it begs to be read in a single setting, The Sense of an Ending has the psychological and emotional depth and sophistication of Henry James at his best, and is a stunning achievement in Julian Barnes's oeuvre.
This intense novel follows Tony Webster, a middle-aged man, as he contends with a past he never thought much about-until his closest childhood friends return with a vengeance: one of them from the grave, another maddeningly present. Tony thought he left this all behind as he built a life for himself, and his career has provided him with a secure retirement and an amicable relationship with his ex-wife and daughter, who now has a family of her own. But when he is presented with a mysterious legacy, he is forced 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 setting, The Sense of an Ending has the psychological and emotional depth and sophistication of Henry James at his best, and is a stunning achievement in Julian Barnes's oeuvre.
This intense novel follows Tony Webster, a middle-aged man, as he contends with a past he never thought much about-until his closest childhood friends return with a vengeance: one of them from the grave, another maddeningly present. Tony thought he left this all behind as he built a life for himself, and his career has provided him with a secure retirement and an amicable relationship with his ex-wife and daughter, who now has a family of her own. But when he is presented with a mysterious legacy, he is forced to revise his estimation of his own nature and place in the world.
Editorial Reviews
"Elegant, playful, and remarkable." -The New Yorker
"A page-turner, and when you finish you will return immediately to the beginning." -San Francisco Chronicle
"Beautiful. . . . An elegantly composed, quietly devastating tale." -Heller McAlpin, NPR
"Dense with philosophical ideas. . . . It manages to create genuine suspense as a sort of psychological detective story." -Michiko Kakutani, The New York Times
"Evelyn Waugh did it in Brideshead Revisited, as did Philip Larkin in Jill [and] Kazuo Ishiguro in The Remains of the Day. Now, with his powerfully compact new novel, Julian Barnes takes his place among the subtly assertive practitioners of this quiet art." -The New York Times Book Review
"[A] jewel of conciseness and precision…. The Sense of an Ending packs into so few pages so much that the reader finishes it with a sense of satisfaction more often derived from novels several times its length." -The Los Angeles Times
"Exquisitely crafted, sophisticated, suspenseful, and achingly painful, The Sense of an Ending is a meditation on history, memory, and individual responsibility." -The Philadelphia Inquirer
"Clever, provocative. . . . A brilliant, understated examination of memory and how it works, how it compartmentalizes and fixes impressions to tidily store away." -The Minneapolis Star-Tribune
"Concisely written and yet rich and full of emotional depth. . . . It's highly original as well. And complicated, just like life." -New York Journal of Books
"Elegiac yet potent, The Sense of an Ending probes the mysteries of how we remember and our impulse to redact, correct-and sometimes entirely erase-our pasts." -Vogue
"Ominous and disturbing…. This outwardly tidy and conventional story is one of Barnes's most indelible [and] looms oppressively in our minds." -The Wall Street Journal
"At 163 pages, The Sense of an Ending is the longest book I have ever read, so prepare yourself for rereading. You won't regret it." -Jane Juska, The San Francisco Chronicle
"With his characteristic grace and skill, Barnes manages to turn this cat-and-mouse game into something genuinely suspenseful." -The Washington Post
"Ferocious. . . . A book for the ages." -Cleveland Plain Dealer
"Concisely written and yet rich and full of emotional depth. . . . At times, side-splittingly funny, at others, brutally honest, but always delightfully well observed. . . . Ironically, despite focusing on endings, and on suicide, this is a tremendously life-affirming work. It's highly original as well. And com...
"A page-turner, and when you finish you will return immediately to the beginning." -San Francisco Chronicle
"Beautiful. . . . An elegantly composed, quietly devastating tale." -Heller McAlpin, NPR
"Dense with philosophical ideas. . . . It manages to create genuine suspense as a sort of psychological detective story." -Michiko Kakutani, The New York Times
"Evelyn Waugh did it in Brideshead Revisited, as did Philip Larkin in Jill [and] Kazuo Ishiguro in The Remains of the Day. Now, with his powerfully compact new novel, Julian Barnes takes his place among the subtly assertive practitioners of this quiet art." -The New York Times Book Review
"[A] jewel of conciseness and precision…. The Sense of an Ending packs into so few pages so much that the reader finishes it with a sense of satisfaction more often derived from novels several times its length." -The Los Angeles Times
"Exquisitely crafted, sophisticated, suspenseful, and achingly painful, The Sense of an Ending is a meditation on history, memory, and individual responsibility." -The Philadelphia Inquirer
"Clever, provocative. . . . A brilliant, understated examination of memory and how it works, how it compartmentalizes and fixes impressions to tidily store away." -The Minneapolis Star-Tribune
"Concisely written and yet rich and full of emotional depth. . . . It's highly original as well. And complicated, just like life." -New York Journal of Books
"Elegiac yet potent, The Sense of an Ending probes the mysteries of how we remember and our impulse to redact, correct-and sometimes entirely erase-our pasts." -Vogue
"Ominous and disturbing…. This outwardly tidy and conventional story is one of Barnes's most indelible [and] looms oppressively in our minds." -The Wall Street Journal
"At 163 pages, The Sense of an Ending is the longest book I have ever read, so prepare yourself for rereading. You won't regret it." -Jane Juska, The San Francisco Chronicle
"With his characteristic grace and skill, Barnes manages to turn this cat-and-mouse game into something genuinely suspenseful." -The Washington Post
"Ferocious. . . . A book for the ages." -Cleveland Plain Dealer
"Concisely written and yet rich and full of emotional depth. . . . At times, side-splittingly funny, at others, brutally honest, but always delightfully well observed. . . . Ironically, despite focusing on endings, and on suicide, this is a tremendously life-affirming work. It's highly original as well. And com...
Readers Top Reviews
Sarah G.David K. War
After all the ecstatic reviews I thought I must have missed something because sadly this book said nothing to me. I found virtually all the characters mere outlines and I felt no involvement with them at all. And those that were more defined were unlikeable: the obnoxious Veronica, and Tony, the central figure, wallowing in memories of the past and too wishy washy to stand up to Veronica's unpleasantness. Then Adrian, a central part of "the story" (which to me wasn't really a story, but more like an impersonal account) was a shadowy figure who, when he was involved, seemed rather too aloof and precocious to be likeable. At the end (I was determined to finish it ... I don't like giving up on books) I simply thought: "so what?". It being by Julian Barnes, I really wanted to like it but just couldn't get there.
insomniac
I have read this novella three times now, with gaps of a few years between each go, most recently before I went to see the film (and now having seen it I picture the film's cast as the characters, which is not a bad thing so the casting must have been good). I still can't quite get a handle on the ending and the filmmakers' interpretation didn't help. It's a compulsive read and I'll probably read it again at some point. I definitely get more out of it each time.
millhall
It is not safe to assume that every Booker prize winning novel will be memorable. That is partly down to personal taste, but several recent winners have been disappointing, and reviewed as such by myself amongst others. The sense of an ending is a fine book, worthy of the prize winning accolade. Barnes turns the story of a few relatively undistinguished middle class teenagers into something memorable. He explores the difficulties of growing up; the first tentative steps of building a relationship, and contrives to make a very ordinary life utterly fascinating. He follows two of the teenagers into mature adulthood.It is the very "ordinariness" of the main character which makes his depiction a triumph.Along the way, he teases the reader with gentle insights into philosophy and depicts the sharp pain of rejection quite superbly. His use of language is a delight and the story unfolds with masterly skill. I suspect,like me, many readers will have decided the ending well in advance. I got it wrong. Often a subtle book of this type struggles to find a satisfactory conclusion, but this one succeeds and even adds the perfect title. I am delighted to have read this book and will remember certain elements for a very long time.
Book Bonkers
This Man Booker prize-winner plunges the reader into a postmodern potpourri of misleading signs, ambiguous statements and along roads that point one way but lead somewhere quite different. One sequence of events creates an illusory sense of an evolving narrative which then gets undercut and disrupted by another. Tony's relationship with Veronica, for example, is contested by another suggested relationship with her mother, Sarah. Strange horizontal hand movements and the symbolic flipping of eggs in a pan hint at something going on which only exists in an interstitial narrative space which history and memory can't or won't reach. Julian Barnes is brilliant at these deflections and refractions of sense, 'where the imperfections of memory meet the inadequacies of documentation'. The narrative constantly deconstructs itself, pathetically seeking corroboration of its flimsy acts of recall. Adrian's diary is a piece of the Webster jigsaw that can't be bequeathed, with all the legal wrangling in the world, because getting it 'might disrupt the banal reiteration of memory. It might jump-start something - though I had no idea what.' And that's the point. Tony can't 'travel'; he is stuck in 'subjective time, the kind you wear on your wrist', where the watch has been flipped over. This is 'true time', according to Tony, which 'is measured in your relationship to your memory.' Julian Barnes celebrates the fluidity of the displaced and disruptive voice of a man who, according to Veronica, 'never gets it, and never will'. 'Time', the story spells out, 'is not a fixative - it's a solvent'. Events deliquesce and memories melt through bizarre Oedipal shifts; time warps across vast biographical distances and then collapses into a short anecdotal account of some vague sense of what might be true, or what can be 'got' from Adrian's cryptic equation. The disturbing interflux between historical certainty and the unreliable accumulation of memories makes this a totally compelling read, and if you feel let down by the sense of an ending on p.151, that's precisely, I suspect, what Barnes wants us to feel. Scratch your head into the early hours as you try to work it all out if you want, or, better, turn your watch over and think about it again while you're flipping over the fried eggs in the morning.
Sue Ball
The prose is written in a meditative style and as a reader you are included in the internal debates of the narrator. This makes for absorbing reading. The anti-hero, protagonist, Tony Webster is a sort of everyman character - nothing exceptional, living an ordinary life, as it were creaking his way to the crematorium. A lawyer's letter forces him to re-engage with his past and consider errors of judgement that had far-reaching consequences particularly for his developing a reclusive character, unwilling to expose himself to unnecessary hurt. The novel forces us to reconsider our pasts and how our selective memories can trick us into a false sense of complacency.As a history teacher I found the passages that consider history, particularly in the lessons that Tony remembers from his schooldays, a stimulating perspective on our personal histories and how the past is another country. But Julian Barnes is saying the past is a country that should be revisited if we are to find any meaning in our lives especially when we come to the end of our lives so that we can make sense of the ending.
Short Excerpt Teaser
I remember, in no particular order:
– a shiny inner wrist;
– steam rising from a wet sink as a hot frying pan is laughingly tossed into it;
– gouts of sperm circling a plughole, before being sluiced down the full length of a tall house;
– a river rushing nonsensically upstream, its wave and wash lit by half a dozen chasing torchbeams;
– another river, broad and grey, the direction of its flow disguised by a stiff wind exciting the surface;
– bathwater long gone cold behind a locked door. This last isn't something I actually saw, but what you end up remembering isn't always the same as what you have witnessed.
We live in time – it holds us and moulds us – but I've never felt I understood it very well. And I'm not referring to theories about how it bends and doubles back, or may exist elsewhere in parallel versions. No, I mean ordinary, everyday time, which clocks and watches assure us passes regularly: tick-tock, click-clock. Is there anything more plausible than a second hand? And yet it takes only the smallest pleasure or pain to teach us time's malleability. Some emotions speed it up, others slow it down; occasionally, it seems to go missing – until the eventual point when it really does go missing, never to return.
* * *
I'm not very interested in my schooldays, and don't feel any nostalgia for them. But school is where it all began, so I need to return briefly to a few incidents that have grown into anecdotes, to some approximate memories which time has deformed into certainty. If I can't be sure of the actual events any more, I can at least be true to the impressions those facts left. That's the best I can manage.
There were three of us, and he now made the fourth. We hadn't expected to add to our tight number: cliques and pairings had happened long before, and we were already beginning to imagine our escape from school into life. His name was Adrian Finn, a tall, shy boy who initially kept his eyes down and his mind to himself. For the first day or two, we took little notice of him: at our school there was no welcoming ceremony, let alone its opposite, the punitive induction. We just registered his presence and waited.
The masters were more interested in him than we were. They had to work out his intelligence and sense of discipline, calculate how well he'd previously been taught, and if he might prove ‘scholarship material'. On the third morning of that autumn term, we had a history class with Old Joe Hunt, wryly affable in his three-piece suit, a teacher whose system of control depended on maintaining sufficient but not excessive boredom.
‘Now, you'll remember that I asked you to do some preliminary reading about the reign of Henry VIII.' Colin, Alex and I squinted at one another, hoping that the question wouldn't be flicked, like an angler's fly, to land on one of our heads. ‘Who might like to offer a characterisation of the age?' He drew his own conclusion from our averted eyes. ‘Well, Marshall, perhaps. How would you describe Henry VIII's reign?"
Our relief was greater than our curiosity, because Marshall was a cautious know-nothing who lacked the inventiveness of true ignorance. He searched for possible hidden complexities in the question before eventually locating a response.
‘There was unrest, sir.'
An outbreak of barely controlled smirking; Hunt himself almost smiled.
‘Would you, perhaps, care to elaborate?'
Marshall nodded slow assent, thought a little longer, and decided it was no time for caution. ‘I'd say there was great unrest, sir.'
‘Finn, then. Are you up in this period?'
The new boy was sitting a row ahead and to my left. He had shown no evident reaction to Marshall's idiocies.
‘Not really, sir, I'm afraid. But there is one line of thought according to which all you can truly say of any historical event – even the outbreak of the First World War, for example – is that "something happened".'
‘Is there, indeed? Well, that would put me out of a job, wouldn't it?' After some sycophantic laughter, Old Joe Hunt pardoned our holiday idleness and filled us in on the polygamous royal butcher.
At the next break, I sought out Finn.‘I'm Tony Webster.' He looked at me warily. ‘Great line to Hunt.' He seemed not to know what I was referring to. ‘About something happening.'
‘Oh. Yes. I was rather disappointed he didn't take it up.'
That wasn't what he was supposed to say.
Another detail I remember: the three of us, as a symbol of our bond, used to wear our watches with the face on the inside of the wrist. It was an affectation, of course, but perhaps something more. It made time feel like a personal, even a secret, thing.We ...
– a shiny inner wrist;
– steam rising from a wet sink as a hot frying pan is laughingly tossed into it;
– gouts of sperm circling a plughole, before being sluiced down the full length of a tall house;
– a river rushing nonsensically upstream, its wave and wash lit by half a dozen chasing torchbeams;
– another river, broad and grey, the direction of its flow disguised by a stiff wind exciting the surface;
– bathwater long gone cold behind a locked door. This last isn't something I actually saw, but what you end up remembering isn't always the same as what you have witnessed.
We live in time – it holds us and moulds us – but I've never felt I understood it very well. And I'm not referring to theories about how it bends and doubles back, or may exist elsewhere in parallel versions. No, I mean ordinary, everyday time, which clocks and watches assure us passes regularly: tick-tock, click-clock. Is there anything more plausible than a second hand? And yet it takes only the smallest pleasure or pain to teach us time's malleability. Some emotions speed it up, others slow it down; occasionally, it seems to go missing – until the eventual point when it really does go missing, never to return.
* * *
I'm not very interested in my schooldays, and don't feel any nostalgia for them. But school is where it all began, so I need to return briefly to a few incidents that have grown into anecdotes, to some approximate memories which time has deformed into certainty. If I can't be sure of the actual events any more, I can at least be true to the impressions those facts left. That's the best I can manage.
There were three of us, and he now made the fourth. We hadn't expected to add to our tight number: cliques and pairings had happened long before, and we were already beginning to imagine our escape from school into life. His name was Adrian Finn, a tall, shy boy who initially kept his eyes down and his mind to himself. For the first day or two, we took little notice of him: at our school there was no welcoming ceremony, let alone its opposite, the punitive induction. We just registered his presence and waited.
The masters were more interested in him than we were. They had to work out his intelligence and sense of discipline, calculate how well he'd previously been taught, and if he might prove ‘scholarship material'. On the third morning of that autumn term, we had a history class with Old Joe Hunt, wryly affable in his three-piece suit, a teacher whose system of control depended on maintaining sufficient but not excessive boredom.
‘Now, you'll remember that I asked you to do some preliminary reading about the reign of Henry VIII.' Colin, Alex and I squinted at one another, hoping that the question wouldn't be flicked, like an angler's fly, to land on one of our heads. ‘Who might like to offer a characterisation of the age?' He drew his own conclusion from our averted eyes. ‘Well, Marshall, perhaps. How would you describe Henry VIII's reign?"
Our relief was greater than our curiosity, because Marshall was a cautious know-nothing who lacked the inventiveness of true ignorance. He searched for possible hidden complexities in the question before eventually locating a response.
‘There was unrest, sir.'
An outbreak of barely controlled smirking; Hunt himself almost smiled.
‘Would you, perhaps, care to elaborate?'
Marshall nodded slow assent, thought a little longer, and decided it was no time for caution. ‘I'd say there was great unrest, sir.'
‘Finn, then. Are you up in this period?'
The new boy was sitting a row ahead and to my left. He had shown no evident reaction to Marshall's idiocies.
‘Not really, sir, I'm afraid. But there is one line of thought according to which all you can truly say of any historical event – even the outbreak of the First World War, for example – is that "something happened".'
‘Is there, indeed? Well, that would put me out of a job, wouldn't it?' After some sycophantic laughter, Old Joe Hunt pardoned our holiday idleness and filled us in on the polygamous royal butcher.
At the next break, I sought out Finn.‘I'm Tony Webster.' He looked at me warily. ‘Great line to Hunt.' He seemed not to know what I was referring to. ‘About something happening.'
‘Oh. Yes. I was rather disappointed he didn't take it up.'
That wasn't what he was supposed to say.
Another detail I remember: the three of us, as a symbol of our bond, used to wear our watches with the face on the inside of the wrist. It was an affectation, of course, but perhaps something more. It made time feel like a personal, even a secret, thing.We ...
