Julian Barnes and the Diminishing
of the English Novel
By GEOFF
DYER
The narrator of Julian Barnes’s acclaimed novel
“The Sense of an Ending” is told by Veronica, a girlfriend from his university
days, that he just doesn’t get it. Then, after more clues have come his way,
she tells him that he still doesn’t get it. There are so many things he doesn’t
get that he even considers using the line as his epitaph: “Tony Webster — He
Never Got It.”
My feelings exactly. I didn’t get the book when I
first read it. I still didn’t get it when I reread it after Barnes won this
year’s Man Booker Prize, and Stella Rimington, chairwoman of the judging panel
(and former head of MI5), said there was more to get each time you read it. To
me, there seemed less to get second time around. If such a thing is possible, I
didn’t get it even more than I hadn’t got it first time around. However, to
pick up on one of the book’s themes, the accumulation of not getting things can
add up to a kind of understanding.
“The Sense of an Ending” is a very short novel in
which Tony keeps circling back to memories of Veronica, particularly to a
mildly anxious weekend he endured at her parents’ house. This was back in the
’60s, before the ’60s really became the ’60s, when all but a few pockets of
England were stuck in a slightly less austere addendum to the late ’50s. That
weekend begins to makes sense only in light of what comes after — which in turn
has to be seen in the context of what came before, when Tony and two friends
were at school. These school days are actually rendered rather brilliantly,
especially the moments in which a new boy, Adrian, bursts on the scene,
startling the friends with his precocious intelligence. Later, after Tony has
broken up with his girlfriend, Adrian commits suicide. This would be my first
objection. Obviously people commit suicide, for a variety of reasons, but in
fiction they tend to do so primarily in the service of authorial convenience.
And convenience invariably becomes a near-anagram of contrivance.
Plotwise, not a lot happens. Veronica’s mother
dies, leaving Tony, by now retired and divorced, some money and a “document”
that turns out to be Adrian’s diary, only a copied fragment of which Veronica
is willing to release to Tony. This excerpt ends tantalizingly, “So, for
instance, if Tony.” The rest of the book, not surprisingly, involves Tony
trying to get his mitts on the diary.
The paucity of action gives Tony ample opportunity
to reflect on — and enact — the self-serving and self-deceiving workings of
memory. “Again, I must stress that this is my reading now of what happened
then. Or rather, my memory now of my reading then of what was happening at the
time, ” Tony declares in one of several reiterations of the book’s central ideas.
These ideas might better be termed commonplaces.
But while commonplaces tend to dress themselves up in their Sunday best to
assume greater weight, Barnes has always treated them lightly so that, by a
kind of negation of the negation, they are taken . . . seriously! (Note
Barnes’s pre-emptive body swerve: announced early on, one of Adrian’s pet
aversions is “the way the English have of not being serious about being
serious.”) Something similar operates at the level of feeling. The author’s
famous restraint and withholding take on the form — and are evidence — of a
powerful emotion that is being held in. How do we detect this submerged
pressure of emotion? By the fact that it has been so thoroughly restrained as
to appear nonexistent. Absence is proof of presence.
We must be fair. Quizzed by a master at school,
Adrian comes up with a breathtaking aphorism: “History is that certainty
produced at the point where the imperfections of memory meet the inadequacies
of documentation.” It turns out Adrian is quoting a Frenchman, Patrick
Lagrange. Proof that Barnes doesn’t have any ideas of his own! Except that
Lagrange has been invented by Adrian (on the spur of the moment), and
self-evidently by Barnes, which means he does have ideas of
his own! But this then throws up a rudimentary technical problem, namely, that
we are expected to believe that Adrian could have come up with a formulation —
and an alleged source — not only implausibly beyond the capacities of even the
most precocious adolescent but distinctly sharper than anything else his
creator manages in the course of the book.
Tony’s less startling observations often take the
form of rhetorical questions posed by “a pedantic, unignorable bore” who does
not like “mess” and, as he puts it in one of his endless perambulations round
the point, can “only be straightforward.” Not that he is a pathologically
unreliable narrator. He is a reliably unreliable narrator, a representative of
the national average. Ever since he left school, Tony reliably informs us, he
has been “average”: “Average at university and work; average in friendship,
loyalty, love; average, no doubt, at sex. There was a survey of British
motorists a few years ago which showed that 95 percent of those polled thought
they were ‘better than average’ drivers. But by the law of averages, we’re most
of us bound to be average.”
Now, the delineation of ordinariness is not a
peculiarly English preoccupation. The narrator of Richard Ford’s Frank Bascombe
trilogy leads “the normal applauseless life of us all,” and tells us about it
in a “no-frills voice that hopes to uncover simple truth by a straight-on
application of the facts.” In Ford’s hands, this becomes an ambitious
undertaking that has the sprawling amplitude of a prose continent at its
disposal. Across the Atlantic, meanwhile, Barnes’s infolded scrupulousness
seems every bit as well adapted to a reduced idea of English fiction, to a
habit of reading that appeals (I get it!) and wearies (yeah, I get it!) in
equal measure. The English Ford — Ford Madox Ford — prepared the narrative
formula in “The Good Soldier” (“Is all this digression or isn’t it
digression?”) in 1915; instead of being patented, however, it was, so to speak,
nationalized. A recomposition of the passively active ingredients can be found
in Kazuo Ishiguro’s narratives of wanly undermined self-evasion, most notably
“The Remains of the Day.” The efficacy of the mixture is tried and tested even
if the precise sources remain obscure — but if they are recognized then so much
the better. Thus Barnes’s title gives averagely well-informed readers a
preparatory pat on the back as they recognize that it has been lifted from a
well-known book of criticism by Hugh Kenner.
This was not one of those years when the Man Booker
Prize winner was laughably bad. No, any extreme expression of opinion about
“The Sense of an Ending” feels inappropriate. It isn’t terrible, it is just so
. . . average. It is averagely compelling (I finished it), involves an average
amount of concentration and, if such a thing makes sense, is averagely well
written: excellent in its averageness!
Two final points. First, unreliability is not the
sole preserve of fictional narrators. Second, the pleasure of patting oneself
on the back for seizing on instances of unreliability and ignorance is, as the
late Frank Kermode may or may not have pointed out, considerable.
Geoff Dyer is the author of “Otherwise Known as the
Human Condition: Selected Essays and Reviews, 1989-2010” and other books. His column appears
regularly in the Book Review.
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