Sense of Ending

                           Sense Of Ending

                             Julian Barnes

About Author

Julian Patrick Barnes (born 19 January 1946) is an English writer. Barnes won the Man Booker Prize for his book The Sense of an Ending (2011), and three of his earlier books had been shortlisted for the Booker Prize: Flaubert's Parrot (1984), England, England (1998), and Arthur & George (2005). He has also written crime fiction under the pseudonym Dan Kavanagh. In addition to novels, Barnes has published collections of essays and short stories.

About the Novel:

The book's narrator, Tony Webster, is a rueful, solitary sixty something like the Flaubert-fixated Geoffrey Braithwaite, but he describes an early-Sixties adolescence similar to that of Christopher Lloyd in Metroland - commuting from the suburbs to a London day school, envying a friend who reinforces his lack of daring and glamor. The friend is Adrian, introduced, like Charles Bovary, as the "new boy" in class, but he turns out to have more in common with Christopher's Jewish friend Toni, whose "swarthy, thick-lipped Middle European features" emphasized Christopher's "snub-nosed, indeterminately English face".

Adrian's exoticism is neither religious nor racial, but social - he comes from "a broken home" - and intellectual: "If Alex had read Russell and Wittgenstein, Adrian had read Camus and Nietzsche." Adrian's tastes are Continental, and so is his spiritual allegiance: "I hate the way the English have of not being serious about being serious. I really hate it." In contrast to everyone else, he has a life that is "novel-worthy".

The second section of the book portrays the recent circumstances, involving an unexpected bequest, which have prompted Tony's memories of his adolescence and exacerbated his regrets about the cowardice and passivity of his middle years ("Life went by").

Having realized how little he understood as a boy, Tony errs - deafeningly - on the side of caution: "I couldn't at this distance testify", "to be true to my memory, as far as that's ever possible", "Again, I want to stress that this is my reading now of what happened then", "At least, that's how I remember it now". He is so conscientious in elabor­ating on what his story means, and so plain-spoken in setting out his character ("a man who found comfort in his own doggedness"), that the reader is left with nothing to do.