Look back in regret In Julian Barnes' The Sense Of An Ending, a retired old man digs through his memories and finds that his past isn't what it used to be

Look back in regret

In Julian Barnes' The Sense Of An Ending, a retired old man digs through his memories and finds that his past isn't what it used to be

Julian Barnes once described the Booker Prize, for which he has been shortlisted four times, as "posh bingo." He's made it to the shortlist once more with The Sense Of An Ending. Considered something of a favourite for the win, this time around Barnes may just prove his point. His book is clever, witty, cynical and ironic, and with abundant apparent skill at the twist and sleight of phrase, but his latest offering relies a little too much on the art of the essay for a novel. The story, such as it is, fits easily into the 150 pages accorded to it. An unremarkable man in his sixties called Tony looks back on his childhood, youth, and middle age. Things appear to be on an even keel; he's had a couple of love affairs, a marriage, a child, and a divorce and is now fading into a benign old age. And then a letter arrives from a lawyer that forces him to reconsider his past, both the people in it and the role played by his younger self. He begins to dig among his memories and lay them out to better understand them. The principal players are his first girlfriend Veronica, and his deceased school friend Adrian. Nostalgia is to be expected; perhaps even some play on sentimentality, but the flogging of a trope is what follows when Barnes begins to apply a central theme to each of the carefully selected memories. So, a group of schoolchildren discuss the difficulty of history as "the question of subjective versus objective interpretation." What follows from there is a continual setting up and breaking down of memories until the idea of all events in the past being essentially unknowable becomes a hobbyhorse Barnes is riding all by himself. "Again, I want to stress that this is my reading now of what happened then," he adds, as a most typical warning to accompany any personal snippet. Or, as Tony muses, "the history that happens underneath our noses ought to be the clearest, and yet it's the most deliquescent. We live in time, it bounds us and defines us, and time is supposed to measure history, isn't it? But if we can't understand time, can't grasp its mysteries of pace and progress, what chance do we have with history — even our own small, personal, largely undocumented piece of it?" "Small," and "personal," Tony's history undoubtedly is. But where TS Elliot could offer poetic drama with 'The Love Song of J Alfred Prufrock', despite giving us a hero who states "I am not Prince Hamlet, nor was I meant to be…", Barnes gives us a protagonist who is reduced by his own memories, cut and redefined, made smaller and meaner, until he dwindles to a point where it's hard to care. And what story there is, is punctured by his admissions and readmissions, "But Tony was and is Tony, a man who found comfort in his own doggedness." Barnes' control over the ebb and flow of the pattern of connections and associations means that the very first pages we read and the very last, contain the same ripple of awareness — notions of "unrest," and "accumulation" and "responsibility" are what we gather are important here. A beautiful motif introduced, as one of Tony's earliest memories, is of the currents on the river Thames being reversed — the idea that memory itself can go upstream and not always flow in one direction. The novel doesn't quite work that way though. The Sense Of An Ending doesn't gather itself, and flow into, a sea of brightening evocation. Instead, with the narrator stating time and again, "at least, that's how I remember it now," the narrative is pulled too often into rumination for it to take wing as a novel. But all said and done, Barnes' meditative prose is itself such a joy to read it won't be surprising if it gets him the Booker.