Julian Barnes's "The Sense of an Ending" is a novel with a subtext that is very different from its appearance. The story's surface is simple, polished almost to dullness and dependent on the revelation of a great secret that comes in the final pages. But what is hidden between the lines and perceived only through cracks of the controlled façade is far more chaotic—and likely to leave the reader unsettled for days after finishing this brief book.
The novel, which has been short-listed for the Man Booker Prize, is narrated by a retiree named Tony Webster, who lives on the outskirts of London. He is eager to emphasize the utter ordinariness of his life: stable job, marriage, amicable divorce, child who grew up to have a child of her own; "some achievements and some disappointments. It's been interesting, though I wouldn't complain or be amazed if others found it less so."
Tony's confidence in his unimpeachable insignificance is shaken when, in the tradition of a Victorian potboiler, he is notified by a lawyer that he will receive a mysterious inheritance: a modest sum of money and a diary. They come from a former girlfriend's mother—a woman he met once, vaguely flirted with and never spoke to again—but the diary is one that had been kept by a school friend of Tony's named Adrian Finn. The first half of "The Sense of an Ending" recounts Tony's memories of Adrian and of the ex-girlfriend, Veronica, or what remains after the accretion of many years.
As teenagers, Adrian was the "serious" one among Tony's gang of friends—that word is used often in the novel to distinguish between those who bravely confront life's profound questions and those who, like Tony (and, Tony suggests, almost the entire English middle class), are content to live quietly and deferentially.
Adrian goes to Cambridge, where he studies philosophy, and Tony goes to Bristol, where he finds, at last, a girlfriend. But the relationship with Veronica is hardly what he had dreamed of: In his recollection, she takes advantage of his passivity, bossing him around but depriving him of sex, the only thing he really desires. "You're quite cowardly, aren't you, Tony?" Veronica says to him at one point. He quibbles: No, it's simply that he is "peaceable." They break up, and soon afterward Tony learns that Veronica has begun dating Adrian. Tony sends them a snide letter and washes his hands of them; then he gets the news that Adrian has killed himself.
The Sense of an Ending
By Julian Barnes
(Knopf, 163 pages, $23.95)
Adrian, it turns out, wrote a detailed suicide note explaining the philosophical logic behind cutting his wrists. "That's sort of . . . Greek, isn't it?" Tony asks a friend, who also knew Adrian. The friend replies: "More the exemplary Roman, I'd say. Opening the vein." And with this historical context Tony is able to process Adrian's death: a high-minded renunciation of the inadequate terms of life, admirable for those of a certain temperament, but not for Tony.
And that is how he continues to feel until he receives the bequest from Veronica's mother 40 years later. He contacts Veronica, who has become unstable and refuses to give him the diary. But through puzzling and elliptical clues, she tries to make him understand the truth of what happened to Adrian—and the unforeseen way that Tony was involved.
On the surface, we have a familiar parable about remorse—about a repressed Englishman who discovers in late life that, despite all his caution, he shares the responsibility for a tragedy. The realization prompts Tony to many lamenting reflections about the treachery of memory and time, and the prose conveying these thoughts is limpid and concise—indeed, so concise that Tony's anguish often seems digested into quotable bromides: "We live with such easy assumptions, don't we? For instance, that memory equals events plus time. But it's all much odder than this. Who was it who said that memory is what we thought we'd forgotten? And it ought to be obvious to us that time doesn't act as a fixative, rather as a solvent."
Mr. Barnes generates much suspense by withholding the final twist, but the typical aim of surprise endings, even sad ones, is to provide a feeling of order and comfort. The book has been "solved," its nagging problems canceled out. Why, then, is "The Sense of an Ending" so ominous and disturbing? Because we have the constant suspicion that Tony is an unreliable narrator, but unreliable in a distinctive way—he seems to be lying more to himself than to the reader.
Two years ago, Mr. Barnes published a nonfiction work called "Nothing to Be Frightened Of." It is a moving middle-life excavation of the struggle to cope with mortality. In it he asks readers to consider the book's title with an emphasis on the word "Nothing"—suddenly a consoling phrase becomes a terrifying one, about the fear of death's abyss. Now, in "The Sense of an Ending," Tony, who repeatedly refers to his "instinct for self-preservation," seems to have immured himself in a fortress of bourgeois dullness in order to avoid glimpsing that abyss.
This self-preservationist, then, is least reliable when he claims unreliability. There is something deeply disingenuous about Tony's insistence that "new memories suddenly came upon me" after seeing Veronica. His convenient forgetfulness does not seem a consequence of time's solvent effect but a willful repression. And when Tony makes his pat declarations of remorse and sadness, he seems to be continuing to intentionally miss the point. The prospect of annihilation is so anarchic and unbearable that even when telling a story about a friend's suicide Tony cannot bear to look honestly at the tragic event itself.
Mr. Barnes's earlier novels, like "Flaubert's Parrot" (1984) and "A History of the World in 10½ Chapters" (1989), used experimental forms to deliver simple emotional responses. The reversal here is extremely effective: This outwardly tidy and conventional story is one of his most indelible. It points a hard finger at the subconscious attempt to evade death and tragedy through mediocrity. The sense of an ending—of mortality—is never directly confronted by Tony, but it looms oppressively in our minds.
Mr. Sacks writes the Fiction Chronicle for the weekend Journal.