Life in Smoke and Mirrors

By Michiko Kakutani

THE SENSE OF AN ENDING

A Novel

By Julian Barnes

163 pages. Alfred A. Knopf. $23.95.

If there is a single theme running throughout Julian Barnes’s work, from his 1985 masterpiece,“Flaubert’s Parrot,” to “A History of the World in 10 ½ Chapters” (1989), “Love, Etc.,” and recent collections like “Pulse” (2011), it’s the elusiveness of truth, the subjectivity of memory, the relativity of all knowledge. While earlier books examined our limited ability to comprehend other people and other eras, his latest novel, “The Sense of an Ending” — which was shortlisted for this year’s Man Booker Prize (the winner will be announced Tuesday) — looks at the ways in which people distort or tailor the past in an effort to mythologize their own lives.

Much as his talented contemporary Kazuo Ishiguro did in “The Remains of the Day,” Mr. Barnes has used the device of the unreliable narrator — borrowed, it would seem, in both cases, from Ford Madox Ford’s classic, “The Good Soldier” — to explicate this phenomenon. Like some of Mr. Barnes’s earlier works of fiction “The Sense of an Ending” (the title has been lifted from a work of literary theory by the critic Frank Kermode) is dense with philosophical ideas and more clever than emotionally satisfying. Still, it manages to create genuine suspense as a sort of psychological detective story. We not only want to find out how Mr. Barnes’s narrator, Tony Webster, has rewritten his own history — and discover what actually happened some 40 years ago — but also understand why he has needed to do so.

Tony, now in his 60s, has persuaded himself he’s “achieved a state of peaceableness, even peacefulness,” though he never had any of the great adventures he once dreamed about having as a boy who hoped life might resemble the books he loved. Tony’s account of his youth — delivered in the first half of the novel — emphasizes the awkwardness and repression he and his high school friends experienced when it came to girls: “But wasn’t this the ’60s? Yes, but only for some people, only in certain parts” of England.

At this point Tony’s reminiscences seem pretty straightforward. As Tony recalls it, he looked up to a new boy in his school named Adrian Finn as a “truth-seeker” and model of intellectual sophistication. The brilliant, Camus-reading Adrian went off to Cambridge, Tony to a less distinguished university, where he became involved with an enigmatic woman named Veronica Ford; after Tony and Veronica’s affair came to an abrupt end, Adrian wrote Tony asking for his permission to go out with Veronica. Then, suddenly, at 22, Adrian committed suicide, leaving a note about his philosophical decision to choose death over life.

As for Tony, he went on to work as an arts administrator, married a sensible woman named Margaret, had a daughter named Susie, and after a dozen years got an amicable divorce. He says he admires Adrian for having the courage to act on his convictions, whereas he, Tony, chose tidiness and safety: “I recycle; I clean and decorate my flat to keep up its value. I’ve made my will; and my dealings with my daughter, son-in-law, grandchildren and ex-wife are, if less than perfect, at least settled.”

This dull life, Mr. Barnes suggests, is rocked to its core when Tony receives a mysterious letter from a law firm informing him that one Sarah Ford — Veronica’s mother, it turns out, whom he met briefly one weekend decades ago — has left him something in her will: a bequest of £500 and, weirdly, Adrian’s diary, which somehow came into her possession. When Tony tries to take ownership of the diary, he learns that Veronica is reluctant to turn it over — all of which leads to a series of cryptic exchanges with Veronica that leave him questioning his own feelings about her, and, for that matter, the veracity of all that happened so many decades ago.

To what degree has Tony deluded us — and himself — with his simplistic account of the love triangle among himself, Veronica and Adrian? Has he romanticized Adrian’s suicide, or has Adrian himself used philosophy as a rationalization for an act motivated by darker, more desperate impulses? Is Veronica to blame for Adrian’s death, or is she some sort of victim?

In raising these questions Mr. Barnes has Tony survey the receding vistas of his life, raising many of the same issues — regarding age, time and mortality — that he’s explored with more heartfelt emotion in recent books like “Pulse” and “The Lemon Table” (2004). In the end there is something vaguely condescending about the author’s portrait of Tony, who is presented as such a myopic and passive-aggressive twit that the reader finds it hard not to be annoyed with him. Mr. Barnes also concludes Tony’s story with a violent twist that feels more like a narrative contrivance than an inevitable revealing.

Mr. Barnes does an agile job, however, of unpeeling the onion layers of his hero’s life while showing how Tony has sliced and diced his past in order to create a self he can live with. In doing so Mr. Barnes underscores the ways people try to erase or edit their youthful follies and disappointments, converting actual events into anecdotes, and those anecdotes into a narrative.

“It strikes me that this may be one of the differences between youth and age,” Tony says, “when we are young, we invent different futures for ourselves; when we are old, we invent different pasts for others.”

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/10/17/books/Julian-Barness-Sense-of-an-Ending-Review.html?ref=julianbarnes&pagewanted=print