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FICTION IN REVIEW: “SPOILER ALERT”: JULIAN BARNES
- The Yale Review
- Johns Hopkins University Press
- Volume 100, Number 4, October 2012
- pp. 147-154
- 10.1353/tyr.2012.0017
- Article
- Additional Information
1 4 7 R F I C T I O N I N R E V I E W A M Y H U N G E R F O R D It is a remarkable feat of decorum on the part of literary reviewers that none of the major reviews of Julian Barnes’s most recent novel, The Sense of an Ending, dares to discuss the book’s . . . well, ending. They discuss the last sentences, they describe the change that has come over our sense of the narrator, they talk about the philosophy of history, about the inherent dishonesty of autobiography . But when they refer to the foundational conceit upon which the plot, the ending, and thus the whole mountain of praise and the teetering capstone of the Man Booker prize sit, they do so only in veiled terms. Dear reader, a spoiler alert: I am going to discuss the ending, in all its gothic glory. If you haven’t read the novel, go ahead; it won’t take long. Or don’t. Reading will be a di√erent sort of experience with the ending spoiled, but interesting and probably pleasurable nevertheless. True to the title Barnes has chosen, the ending is what we need to make sense of, and I would consider myself a T h e S e n s e o f a n E n d i n g , by Julian Barnes (Knopf, 176 pp., $23.95). 1 4 8 H U N G E R F O R D Y sorry reviewer if I dodged the challenge, especially in a journal that makes no pretense of publishing reviews that are immediately timed to a book’s release. (As a side note, may this review serve as an example of why the quarterly – which is to say, the untimely – remains valuable in the age of instant opinion.) So let the spoiling begin. In this novel an old man, an Englishman named Tony Webster, tells the story of his life. At the heart of that story is the story of his childhood friendship with a brilliant boy named Adrian. Adrian later marries Tony’s former girlfriend, Veronica. Soon after the marriage, Adrian sleeps with Veronica’s mother, Sarah, and gets her pregnant. Adrian opts out of life shortly thereafter, slitting his wrists and bleeding to death in a tub of warm water. The son born to Sarah turns out to be mentally disabled (due, we understand, to her advanced age; note the biblical appropriateness of her name). Sarah dies many years later and leaves Tony five hundred pounds and Adrian’s diary, which was somehow in her possession. Veronica has taken the diary, though, and won’t give it to Tony. In his e√ort to get his hands on it, Tony reopens communications with Veronica and eventually discovers what happened during her marriage to Adrian those many years ago. Veronica refuses to spell it out for him, preferring instead to lead him out one day to observe Adrian and Sarah’s now-grown son as he goes about his daily life in care at a group home. Tony can see the stamp of Adrian’s face but assumes Veronica is the mother. After much obsessive stalking of the poor man, Tony comes to understand – as do we, finally – the true identity of the mother. The experience of reading this novel is nothing like the experience of reading this plot summary. If you want a quick marker, one could say that it is much more like reading another Man Booker prize-winning novel, Kazuo Ishiguro’s The Remains of the Day. As in that novel, the protagonist narrates the story in a language that is even, mannered, a bit bland, very English. He is modest in a classically English sense, intent on emphasizing the humble decency of his life, showing us his flaws (for Tony, the cool relationship with his daughter), his fastidiousness (tidy flat, recycling, tea), and his British nostalgia for boyhood. Tony’s memory of a history master’s wit and gru√ indulgence of the boys glows with the aura of the English public school we see in movies. F I C T I...