Hindsight 20/20?

The Man Booker Prize

I’d never read Julian Barnes.  When he finally won the Booker Prize last year, ‘The Sense of an Ending’ went on my list.  I’ve no idea about his other works, but this is a special novel.  It’s short, moving, interesting, and troubling. The story is told in the first person by a late middle-aged man who is trying to make sense of his past.  It’s a short work, and while the plot does move forward as we learn more about his life, I think the overall mood and ethos of the book is more important.  The protagonist is trying to come to grips with his failures and shortcomings, and with events that he has never fully understood.  When he was young he was convinced that he was in control, he could make things happen.  Later in life, he realizes that life has happened to him, and he has reacted as best he could.

We feel his melancholy and uncertainty.  It’s a meditation on ageing, memory, and regret.  It’s a convincing, understated, sophisticated portrait of a stage in life when we wonder what was, what could have been, what might have been, what never could have been.  The ending does reveal an important plot element that answers some questions, but the majority of the questions remain unanswered.  We are meant to experience the enigma, the puzzle, the unknowable.

The language is nuanced and sometimes poetic.  Philosophy plays a role here, but never in a pedantic way.  Think of an intelligent educated man in his late fifties sitting by a window in the late afternoon on an autumn day.  He’s had a glass of wine.  He’s thinking …. thinking.  His mind is a little muddled;  he can’t be totally coherent, but he does his best to sort things out.  Some issues he has control over.  Others not so much. 

I am sometimes in such a mood, and I very much appreciate Barnes’s portrayal of how it feels.  This is probably not a book for young people (or at least not for unimaginative young people).   Not sure I would have appreciated it 25 years ago.  But now I get it.  As much as I can.