"The Sense of an Ending" is a Masterful Novel

(randomhouse.co.nz)

The 2011 winner of Britain's Man Booker Prize, Julian Barnes' The Sense of an Ending is a wonderfully rich, lyrical novel that is a meditation on memory and aging which nonetheless offers up an unexpected ending that has stirred up its share of controversy.

I confess to being delightfully lulled into a literary reverie at the writer's insights as they are framed by a story of a group four schoolboys whose lives are touched by tragedy whilst still in secondary school. The impression that one death is the catalyst for much of the trajectory of the story is what is immediately reminiscent of another contemporary British novel, Ian McEwan's remarkable Atonement. Where "Ending" differs is the incident of another tragedy that hits even closer to home than that initial death.

The story absorbs this second incident and then continues on its rhapsodic path until the narrator, later in life, is reunited with a character from his past who manages to introduce him, and by extension the reader, to characters that can't help but prove bewildering as they proceed to dominate the book to its controversial conclusion. I confess to being confused at the end of "Ending", experiencing a sense of dislocation I can't recall upon closing a book in ages. 

After rereading the final section of the book, it became clearer to me what that mysterious ending was indeed about. A few days on, I still question the extent with which Barnes throws this unexpected ending to his readers, given the overall elegiac and pensive tone of the bulk of this wonderful novel. I have since concluded that the ending does indeed work as a piece of the overall whole and may just prove to be its most memorable element. 

While the book does not scream "film adaptation" as evidently as Atonement did when I read it years ago, there are sufficiently compelling characters and richly detailed sequences that would surely render a screen version quite intriguing. What is clear is that Britain seems to be enjoying a robust period of fiction writing, with veteran author Barnes offering perhaps his most widely acclaimed novel to date. It will be interesting to see what he comes up with next.