I started reading Julian Barne's Man Booker Prize-winning novel The Sense of an Ending last night, and finished it this morning. (I did sleep in between, by the way). I should have been writing instead of reading all morning, but oh well, I was intrigued. It was a compelling book, and well-written although, I felt, let down by the ending, which will be spoiled in this post, so if that concerns you, then stop reading now.
This post is going to be half review and half rambling. Well, it will probably be all rambling, but I'll shoehorn in some opinions of the novella as well. At first I really enjoyed the book, up until the last quarter really. In a much truncated form, Barnes almost invoked something of Proust in his musings on time and memory. The story is written intelligently and explores some interesting ideas about philosophy and such. There was a cleverness to the way that Barnes kept referring back to images and motifs he had introduced earlier, but there was something a little too mechanical to it too.
I liked the way he introduced high philosophical ideas, then undermined them with the occasional colloquial crassness or self-reproach of the narrator. Although, something which I've probably picked up on and now regurgitating from an article of the 'Great American Novelists' that I read in the New York Review last month, it seems like Barnes was trying to have his cake and eat it by having the narrator act melodramatic and philosophical one minute and then reproach himself for it the next. It means the other gets to posit a theory, or say something grandiose, then, as a contingency, head off any criticism by saying "what a silly thing to say." No, I can't be bothered to scan the book for examples, that's just the general impression I got (I don't think I'm cut out to be a book reviewer, at least not today).
Anyway, some of the turns of phrase were really good, and I certainly found the book intriguing on an intellectual level. Also, I found the male characters, particularly for such a short book, were well developed, at least the two central ones, Tony (the narrator) and Adrian. The female characters less so. Veronica particularly seemed to behave irrationally and more as a character serving a function in a plot would than as an actual human being. I did not find her believable at all. I think that was partly the point of her: that she was unknowable and the narrator could not her work out, but she was just disparaging and aloof the whole time, without anything to counter-balance this.
The plot is clearly very important to this book, and the psychological depth of the characters is really only a tool to serve this, not an end in itself. The twist at the end makes it the sort of book you can only really read once, but I did not like the ending. The point at which it went downhill for me was when Veronica demands Tony meet her in North London, then drives him in silence to a particular street, parks her car and tells him to look at a ragtag group of social misfits who are made comical by their odd mannerisms and dress sense.
Their sudden insertion into the story seemed random and the narrator's bafflement at their appearance only served to make them seem more incongruous. I'm finding it hard to put my finger on exactly why I find this sort of thing so objectionable. I think I have a strong dislike for any characters or plot elements which are, not exactly wacky, but sort of abnormal or out of place. I don't like stories which focus on absurdity or novelty. I don't like pretty much anything by Neil Gaiman, for example (including the Doctor Who episode he wrote last year).
To put it another way, Ian McEwan, as one of my writing tutors once pointed out, does the random very well. Enduring Love kicks off with a hot-air balloon crashing and several people running to help the boy trapped inside it. This kicks off the whole story, without being entirely relevant to it. It's unexpected, but it's plausible, and is merely a springboard for the plot. If a hot-air balloon crashed at a dramatically convenient part of a serious story, I wouldn't like that. Similarly, suddenly introducing these 'care-in-the-community' characters who argue over "shop or pub" and dress eccentrically, broke my suspension of disbelief.
The narrator then more or less stalks these characters for a while until the big reveal at the end, by which point we have had two suicides, two unwanted pregnancies, three cases of infidelity, at least one plot-convenient memory lapse, one deliberately destroyed diary, and one mysterious will. Looking at that list, it's not surprising that Mr Barnes also wrote crime fiction in the past.
It's not that The Sense of an Ending is a bad book, because it isn't, and I'm sure it's entirely worthy of the 2011 Booker prize, but I think, from how it began, I expected one sort of book, perhaps more A Portrait of the Artist, and it ended up, despite quite a few nice ideas, as something more like a thriller.
I guess that's my review of it. Can you tell I don't write a lot of book reviews? What's hard of course about reviewing any medium in which you work is that in criticising something, you make yourself open to the challenge of "let's see you write something better than." There were times, as a writer, I found parts of The Sense of an Ending dishearteningly good. I think that may be part of the reason I so rarely read contemporary fiction: I feel too much of a sense of competition. It's fine for James Joyce and Marcel Proust to be better than me because everyone accepts their works as classics: they are untouchable and dead. When I read living authors I realise what I have to compete with.
Julian Barnes, though I hadn't heard of him before reading this, is evidently an author a long way into his career now at the peak of his form. I couldn't compete with this novel on its own terms or against its intentions. It is an assured and well-crafted story, aside from my earlier criticisms. It could not have been a first novel, certainly. However, it just doesn't do it for me.
I like stories about ordinary people, or at least people who do ordinary things and reflect on them. In short, yes, I like Modernist stories, stories about introspection and past experience. I don't mind death as an element within a story, but not as a central one, as it is in this story. It's not something I can relate to because it's not a part of ordinary life, it's an exceptional part of life. I find stories which focus on the exceptional, such as death or suicide or guns or violence generally uninteresting. (I think interesting things can be done with these themes, but I dislike them as plot devices, although perhaps I'm generalising too much, or not being clear enough... I said this post would ramble).
Okay, in her essay on Modern fiction, and I'm quoting from memory here, Virginia Woolf said "the moment of importance came not here, but there." It's not everyday that someone you know dies, that is extra-ordinary. But if someone does die, you might think about them nearly every day, which is ordinary. The latter I find more convincing in a story. For this reason, I dislike sudden occurrences and shock reveals. I like foreshadowing to an extent, but the absolute best sort of story for me, and the sort I generally strive to write, is the sort which cannot be spoiled by knowing the ending.
Here is how Ulysses ends: Molly Bloom, despite her infidelities, realises that she still loves her husband. Here is how To the Lighthouse ends: the children, now grown up, finally make their longed-for trip to the lighthouse. Here is how In Search of Lost Time ends: Marcel realises that his life has not been wasted, but will in fact form the content of a great novel, the novel the reader has just read. This is of no consequence to your enjoyment of these novels. These stories are about the journey, not the ending.
As a comparison, here is how The Sense of an Ending ends: Tony realises that his philosophical friend killed himself not as the conclusion to some great existential argument, but because he got Tony's ex-girlfriend's mother pregnant and couldn't handle the consequences. That more or less ruins the novel in the same way that knowing the ending of the Sixth Sense would ruin that film.
A 'twist in the tail' might make for a good read, but it doesn't, in my opinion, make for great literature.
Anyway, as you might have guessed from the title, that wasn't what I originally intended this post to be about, but I think I may start again with another post.
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