The Sense of an Ending

Now in his mid-sixties, British writer Julian Barnes has taken a decidedly thanatotic turn with his recent work. His 2008 memoir-ish Nothing to Be Frightened Of took a look at the certainty of death, the uncertainty of the afterlife, and the cold comforts of religion and philosophy to deal with either. His most recent collection of short stories, the sanguinely titled Pulse, focused on characters for whom the experience of life past one's heyday has become a matter of "managed decline." His latest book and Man Booker prize-winner, The Sense of an Ending, continues this fruitfully morbid exploration. Tony Webster is muddling through a quiet, unexceptional existence (college, marriage, divorce) when a mysterious inheritance from the mother of a difficult girl he briefly dated comes to him, sending him back into his past to piece together what happened, what went wrong, and how he can possibly make amends. Barnes takes a calculated risk in making his narrator a man who not only lacks self-awareness but seeks to avoid it, yet despite a slow beginning, Tony is never less than sympathetic, even as memories of some of his not-so-disengaged and sometimes outright cruel behavior emerge. Barnes' prose throughout is graceful, intelligent, and deeply considered. The flaw, perversely enough, comes at the end in the maddeningly terse way in which Barnes handles a final revelation. Nevertheless, The Sense of an Ending stands as a provocative examination of the perils of living at a too-comfortable distance from life itself.