(2011), which won the Man Booker Prize for fiction. It is a carefully planned tale
which shows in two ways the influence of French writing (Barnes’s parents were
French teachers, and he studied French at Oxford). He first came to critical acclaim
with Flaubert’s Parrot(1984), a triple narrative about the search for the real (now
stuffed) parrot which was the pivot of Gustave Flaubert’s famous story,Un Cœur
Simple. (The ‘simple heart’ of Flaubert’s conteof 1877 is that of a servant, Félicité, a
selfless peasant devoted to the service of others – and to a pet parrot. This bird, when
Félicité is dying, appears to her to be a dove, the symbol of the Holy Spirit.)
Flaubert’s Parrotis a long short story in the disillusioned naturalist style of Flaubert
and his disciple Guy de Maupassant (1850–1893). Barnes’s concern is with narrative
perspective, multiple interpretation, and the uncertainty of knowledge, themes dear
to post-war continental criticism, the germ of which is already there in Flaubert’s
story.
The Sense of an Ending begins with clever school-leavers, as had Barnes’s
Metroland(1980). It has an insecure protagonist who is later seized by jealousy, as
had his Before She Met Me(1983). Tony, an introspective narrator who suspects
himself of being second-rate, is a 1960s Everyman. (In this,The Sense of an Ending
is a dark version of Sue Townsend’s The Secret Diary of Adrian Mole, Aged 13^3 / 4 , with
added physiological detail.) Tony, who is given to deep thoughts, admires the intel-
lect and integrity of Adrian, who goes up to study philosophy at Cambridge. A
contemporary of theirs, a boy at the school, gets a girl pregnant and commits
suicide. The clever set are presented as trying to read the suicide in the terms of
Albert Camus, an Algerian French intellectual who defended self-killing as a rational
choice. At Bristol University, Tony falls for the enigmatic Veronica Ford, who plays
him along but won’t go beyond ‘infra-sex’. When she finally decides to have him, he
decides to drop her. Veronica later takes up with Adrian at Cambridge, and Tony
feels betrayed, rather like the poet of Shakespeare’s Sonnets. Then Adrian commits
suicide.
In the longer seco nd part of the book, forty years on, a still average Tony is now
peaceably divorced and rather bored. Yet he is also more intelligent, more depressed,
perhaps more like Julian Barnes. He learns with surprise that he has been left £500
in the will of Veronica’s mother. Why? The search for a reason plunges him back into
his youth.He seeks out the still enigmatic Veronica, and in the final pages of the
book discovers that he had missed several key aspects of what had happened then.
The ‘sense’ of this ending is painful, and the story is successfully disturbing, leaving
the reader much to ponder. The denouement is a rush of mistaken identities, reve-
lations, a tangle of names. In what is so very constructed a book, the reader may feel
that the complete success with which the author takes his reader’s attention away
from anticipating the nature of these successive revelations also takes away some-
thing from the sense, if not the shock, of this ending. The unreliability of memory
and of history are prominent themes which grow insistent: the narrator, Tony, ‘never
gets it’ until the end. The narrative is therefore like an inversion of Jane Austen’s
Emma,in which the protagonist, enlightened finally and ashamed of her blindness,
is surprised by love. Barnes’s ending is unhappy, postmarital and too late – leaving
Tony ‘on his own’, with corrosive thoughts worrying him to his end. Further senses
of this ending are less clear. Crucial questions are left unresolved. Adrian’s suicide,
fo r example,initially seems, to his Camus-influenced pals, admirable if puzzling.
Tony’s mother blames it on Adrian’s having been ‘too clever’. The possibility is also
raised that the young philosopher was also scared of the responsibility of unplanned
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