...a mystery of memory and missed opportunity … Tony’s tragedy, ‘if this isn’t too grand a word,’ is that he avoids deep connection rather than embracing it, for fear of risking its loss … Barnes’s unreliable narrator is a mystery to himself, which makes the novel one unbroken, sizzling, satisfying fuse. Its puzzle of past causes is decoded by a man who is himself a puzzle. Tony resembles the people he fears, ‘whose main concern is to avoid further damage to themselves, at whatever cost,’ and who wound others with a hypersensitivity that is insensitive to anything but their own needs.
With his characteristic grace and skill, Barnes manages to turn this cat-and-mouse game into something genuinely suspenseful, as Veronica reveals just enough information to make Tony desperate for more. A single page from the diary, which suggests a highly unusual suicide note structured along the lines of Wittgenstein’s Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, is all Veronica will allow him to see … Tony — now a doting grandfather who’s amicably divorced from his wife and spends his days volunteering at a hospital library — is either too dense, or too something else, to connect the dots. And here, finally, is the central question Barnes poses in his novel: If it’s not mere thick-headedness that’s keeping Tony from seeing what actually happened back then, what is it?
The Sense of an Ending is dense with philosophical ideas and more clever than emotionally satisfying. Still, it manages to create genuine suspense as a sort of psychological detective story. We not only want to find out how Mr. Barnes’s narrator, Tony Webster, has rewritten his own history — and discover what actually happened some 40 years ago — but also understand why he has needed to do so … In the end there is something vaguely condescending about the author’s portrait of Tony, who is presented as such a myopic and passive-aggressive twit that the reader finds it hard not to be annoyed with him … Mr. Barnes does an agile job, however, of unpeeling the onion layers of his hero’s life while showing how Tony has sliced and diced his past in order to create a self he can live with.
The story's surface is simple, polished almost to dullness and dependent on the revelation of a great secret that comes in the final pages. But what is hidden between the lines and perceived only through cracks of the controlled façade is far more chaotic—and likely to leave the reader unsettled for days … Mr. Barnes generates much suspense by withholding the final twist, but the typical aim of surprise endings, even sad ones, is to provide a feeling of order and comfort … Why, then, is The Sense of an Ending so ominous and disturbing? Because we have the constant suspicion that Tony is an unreliable narrator, but unreliable in a distinctive way—he seems to be lying more to himself than to the reader.
This book manipulates. It wheedles and churns for our affection. It sounds the right notes. But then, slowly, it dawns on the reader that its teller is not as in control of the facts as he first appears … It is a chilling and potent moment the instant one realizes that Tony, in spite of having lived it, is not an expert in his own life … His agitations for closure progress from the plangent to the comical to the downright rude, giving this short, unlikely novel the even unlikelier distinction of being a page-turner. You arrive at its conclusion breathless and befuddled, duped into the idea that a life's conclusion brings some kind of wisdom. Not always.
...an elegantly composed, quietly devastating tale about memory, aging, time and remorse … Tony's deceptively simple tale — about his first girlfriend, a scaldingly difficult woman named Veronica Ford, who, to his dismay, ‘traded up’ after their breakup to his brilliant boyhood friend, Adrian Finn, with dire results — unfolds in surprising ways … Tony, in struggling to determine the extent of his responsibility for the aftermath of his first romance, wonders whether history consists of the lies of the victors, the self-delusions of the defeated, or, as he comes to believe, ‘the memories of the survivors, most of whom are neither victorious nor defeated’ and who no longer have witnesses to corroborate their recollections.
What this book is about: the unreliability of the eyewitness account, the accumulation of evidence that over time forces Tony Webster to acknowledge the mistakes, the denials, the secrets of his own life and his responsibility for the lives of others. Everything he has believed about himself turns out to be irrelevant; everything he has forgotten is. How does one live with that? Uneasily, at best … The Sense of an Ending is a page-turner, and when you finish you will return immediately to the beginning. Like Tony Webster, we need to make sense of an ending and look ahead to our own.
The history in question is not a national but an individual history. Tony Webster, the 60-ish protagonist of the novel, is a retired divorcee living in suburban England. Tony has been haunted by a chain of incidents that occurred when he was a teenager in the early 1960s … Though Tony claims that he has managed to put Veronica’s rejection of him and the suicide of the gifted Adrian out of mind, he appears haunted by these twin mysteries and he is energized by the opportunity to resolve them. Needless to say, Tony learns more than he bargained for … Barnes has finally found the perfect balance between the drama of ideas and the profundity of plot. It is his best novel.
...a brilliant, understated examination of memory and how it works, how it compartmentalizes and fixes impressions to tidily store away. In Tony's words, his own memory is a ‘mechanism which reiterates apparently truthful data with little variation’ … The second, larger part of the novel rouses Tony from his retirement torpor and challenges his glib constructions of the past. An inexplicable legacy from Veronica's mother (it's been 40 years since he last saw Veronica) launches him on a quest that unsettles the calm routine of his world. Aging, this clever, provocative novel argues, is no ‘fixative’; rather, time acts as a ‘solvent,’ melting our certainties, forcing us to re-examine our acts and our beliefs if we've courage enough.
Dim, un-glamorous Tony is the perfect complacent character to have his world shaken up and, with the unexpected arrival of a legacy — in part monetary but also including a tangible chunk of history — he duly sets about reevaluating his past. What he discovers in the course of this picaresque quest of self-examination upends his comfortable self-image and fundamentally reconfigures relationships to and among people he believed were only tangentially related to his life's journey … The emotional roller coaster ride that Tony Webster has taken with us perched on his shoulder has such heft and intensity that we feel we too have truly experienced his life-altering revision of what he mistakenly believed to be a humdrum existence.
Mr. Barnes' unremarkable story seems to sputter out, although he adds a dramatic turn with Adrian's shocking suicide in graduate school … Without the fictional contrivance of this unlikely intrusion into Tony's humdrum life, our hero would be doomed to live out his ordinary life. Instead, it's the device Mr. Barnes employs to pursue his thoughts on how memory and time can be manipulated to preserve our illusions … The Sense of an Ending lacks the details and sense of reality that make Mr. Barnes' previous novels rewarding reading. Instead the payoff here is unremarkable, as ordinary as Tony's life.
I wanted to like the narrator more than I did. Looking back on events from the perspective of approaching age, he’s too often self-pitying and obtuse. … I was not much engaged, as others apparently were (the book was a NYT best seller) by the philosophical ramblings about time and the fragmentary nature of memory. I found little that was actually new and original in the treatment of a theme that has been with us, in modern literature, at least since Marcel Proust’s great masterpiece. I’m perhaps a little simple-minded about this, but it seemed to me that the book was rather more heavy on the ‘telling’ of the theme than on its ‘showing.’
In the longest, dreariest 163 pages in recent memory, Sense of an Ending offers pretentious philosophical musings masquerading as a novel … A meditation on history and memory, the novel includes some beautiful sentences, and Barnes evokes 1960s England with its lingering class tensions. But the male characters are one-dimensional and the female ones even more feeble. It is never a good sign when the reader constantly blurts out, ‘What motivates these people?’
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 … 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.
...an intense exploration of how we write our own histories and how our actions in moments of anger can have consequences that stretch across decades … What at first seems like a polite meditation on childhood and memory leaves the reader asking difficult questions about how often we strive to paint ourselves in the best possible light.
