It’s going to be hard for me to write about this book without doing some gender griping. In so many ways, it is the same complaint I have about The Great Gatsby, The Catcher in the Rye, and oh, everything ever written by Hunter S. Thompson. I refuse to accept that men are generally as obtuse as they are sometimes made to look in literature.
To be sure, Julian Barnes wants his audience to feel ambivalent, even distaste about the narrator in The Sense of An Ending. But I’d dare any reader to find one character that is likeable. These are people who, when recounted through the eyes of a pretty dense man, appear miserably disengaged as well. A book about miserable people slogging through their own personal miserable memories isn’t literary magic to me.
So was there anything redeeming about this highly acclaimed novel? Of course. Most of all, I found the author’s writing about memory and experience fascinating. I felt it was more than a little corrupted by the silly characters and their silly storyline. Unlike Middlesex, a novel where sex and love are properly elevated, The Sense of An Ending somehow makes these important themes seem deeply unimportant. Perhaps its the type of love and sex addressed. If, in thirty years, I find myself absorbed in the conflicts of my youth again, troubled by lost loves, and no further along in my retrospective insights about that time, I promise to go the way of Adrian.
Julian Barnes is a wonderful writer though. One quote I liked particularly:
Does character develop over time? In novels, of course it does: otherwise there wouldn’t be much of a story. But in life? I sometimes wonder. Our attitudes and opinions change, we develop new habits and eccentricities; but that’s something different, more like decoration. Perhaps character resembles intelligence, except that character peaks a little later: between twenty and thirty, say. And after that, we’re just stuck with what we’ve got. We’re on our own. If so, that would explain a lot of lives, wouldn’t it? And also – if this isn’t too grand a word – our tragedy.
