Waste

Hard to get away with a book narrated by a boring man. Brevity helps. But so does the cleverness of the ideas in it. It’s almost a novella and reminded me in so many ways of On Chesil Beach as well as The Getting of Wisdom. It is about memory and ageing – not surprising topics given Barnes’ age. It’s a topic that resonates a lot for me lately – I too am feeling the synapses snapping in the breeze. On the weekend I saw The Iron Lady, which also concerns itself with this topic. In that film we see things partly through the now-demented eyes of Maggie Thatcher. However the perspective in that film aims to be more omnipresent than is the case in The Sense of an Ending.

I love a novel with an explosive letter – it reminds me of letters that have had lingering impact in my own life. It’s divided into two parts which comprise the set-up – youthful Tony Webster – friends, first love relationship and the payoff – when Tony is in his comfortable 60s. He is a man who thinks he has escaped damage, who has got through life by deliberately limiting his horizons. The opposite of “no pain, no gain”. The letter is a trigger for Tony to re-think his understanding of events – it is like the carpet has been pulled out from under his feet. He is forced to recognise that: ‘What you end up remembering isn’t always the same as what you witnessed."

It made me wish I’d kept more diaries, to wonder what has been lost in my head through the vagaries of time and what I have not remembered accurately. To wonder whether I’d limited my horizons too much. Note Websters sad, sad comment "I had wanted life not to bother me too much, and succeeded – and how pitiful that was."

One reviewer described it better than I can:

“More important, Barnes makes one look back on one's own life to ponder what parts of it have been fabrications, those necessary fictions created to cast ourselves in a better light, to spare ourselves the knowledge of our own shortcomings, short-sightedness and bad behaviour.The cleverness resides not only in the way he has caught just how second-rate Webster's mind is without driving the reader to tears of boredom but in the way he has effectively doubled the length of the book by giving us a final revelation that obliges us to reread it. Without overstating his case in the slightest, Barnes's story is a meditation on the unreliability and falsity of memory; on not getting it the first time round - and possibly not even the second, either. Barnes's revelation is richly ambiguous.
And this is appropriate, for such a slyly subversive book.”

I also found this in an interview with The Guardian:

"In Nothing to Be Frightened Of, his family memoir cum meditation on mortality, Julian Barnes admits that he and his brother disagree about many details of their childhood. His brother, a philosopher, maintains that memories are so often false that they cannot be trusted without independent verification. "I am more trusting, or self-deluding," writes Barnes, "so shall continue as if all my memories are true."

The title is abstract and obscure – I really struggled with what he was alluding to – and then found this in a review by Geordie Williamson:

“The Sense of an Ending: a grey, grim, near-perfect novella whose title,
borrowed from Frank Kermode's 1967 classic of literary criticism, suggests a creative extrapolation of that volume's thesis. Since we are born into the middle of things (and die in much the same place), suggested Kermode, the stories we tell about ourselves serve as consolatory structures, falsifying origins and ends to grant order and meaning to that which has none.”

This is a clever book – it is deceptively simple but caused me to think a lot about my own life. There are some funny bits - he would have had a lot of fun writing the driving scene with the enigmatic ‘Fruitcake’. But in the main, it’s just sad.

PS: Good YouTube clip about the cover design...