Out book club last night discussed The Sense of an Ending and in the course of the discussion, P.D. James' new title, Pemberley came up. James, one of our members - none of whom are ever stuck for the mot juste - delivered the most pithy and conclusive review of a book I have ever heard, viz;
If you like Jane Austen and enjoy detective novels, you will hate this.
What more can one say?
Saturday, February 11, 2012
Monday, January 30, 2012
Costa Book Award: Pure
Is there the sense of an ending of first class literature in the award of the Costa to Andrew Miller for his historical novel, Pure? According to the pundits, there was considerable and bitter dissension amongst the judges. I have mixed feelings about it. I am always uneasy with historical novels because we cannot help but bring our accummulated knowledge and twenty-first century sensitivities into play when reading them and consequently are in turn delighted or appalled by events in a way that is anachronistic. Miller himself pens a note at the end of the novel claiming that 'this is a work of the imagination, a work that combines the actual with the invented...' so this is not history. Is it literature?
There is no doubt I think that Miller is good on detail. His characters are well drawn and fleshed out and in lingering on the ordinary, he makes it extraordinary. We smell the streets, the shops even the breath of the inhabitants of Paris in 1785 and spend a highly amusing evening seeing The Marriage of Figaro at the newly built Odeon. But he leaves us curiously unsatisfied by omitting the bigger picture. There is no sense of impending revolution - apart from the activities of four locals enthusiastically painting graffiti nightly on the walls. There is one passing reference to Rousseau, a nod to the Bastille with another to Diderot and the Encyclopedists. But the overall picture is one of a thriving and busy petit bourgeoisie more concerned with their wine and cheeses than any ideas of fraternity and equality.
The story concerns one, Jean Baptiste Baratte, an engineer from Normandy, who is charged by one of the King's ministers to clear the church and cemetery of Les Innocents which has become so over-filled that the sheer number of corpses have caused it to collapse into the basement of a local house. Centuries of interred bones are to be lifted and moved to newly constructed cemeteries outside Paris. Jean Baptiste is new to Paris and takes up lodgings with Monsieur and Madame Monnard and their daughter in their house overlooking the cemetery. Immediately he becomes aware of the 'stink that creeps through the open window' and which he has even smelt on the breath of the local inhabitants and feels that, as a young man of ideas and ideals, he can conceive of this work as something worthy and serious. As he begins his task we gradually meet the curious characters who will populate his life for the duration. And these characters are the best part of Miller's work. For the rest, Baratte could be quoting Miller himself when he says, in a rather awkward sentence, 'what the world is doing, what it is readying itself for, he will attend to later'. But of course he never does.
Baratte is quite an interesting man, one absorbed by an identity crisis. Every night as he settles to sleep he asks himself, who am I, where do I come from, what are you, what do you believe in. He believes in the power of reason, a child of the Enlightenment, and this in the face of the madness of his work in the cemetery dealing with the thousands of bodies and bones who have lost all identity. He is conscious of his dignity, his scholarly achievements and his position in Normandy as the son of a master glover who also owns land. His attention to and care of his workers seems to be curiously out of joint with eighteenth century mores and I would question its veracity. Sometimes he seems as worthy as the NHS and Social Services rolled into one! He finds love and companionship with a gentle whore, Heloise, an accomplished autodidact who collects books.
This is a good story but unambitious with no great literary merit. A holiday read for next summer!
There is no doubt I think that Miller is good on detail. His characters are well drawn and fleshed out and in lingering on the ordinary, he makes it extraordinary. We smell the streets, the shops even the breath of the inhabitants of Paris in 1785 and spend a highly amusing evening seeing The Marriage of Figaro at the newly built Odeon. But he leaves us curiously unsatisfied by omitting the bigger picture. There is no sense of impending revolution - apart from the activities of four locals enthusiastically painting graffiti nightly on the walls. There is one passing reference to Rousseau, a nod to the Bastille with another to Diderot and the Encyclopedists. But the overall picture is one of a thriving and busy petit bourgeoisie more concerned with their wine and cheeses than any ideas of fraternity and equality.
The story concerns one, Jean Baptiste Baratte, an engineer from Normandy, who is charged by one of the King's ministers to clear the church and cemetery of Les Innocents which has become so over-filled that the sheer number of corpses have caused it to collapse into the basement of a local house. Centuries of interred bones are to be lifted and moved to newly constructed cemeteries outside Paris. Jean Baptiste is new to Paris and takes up lodgings with Monsieur and Madame Monnard and their daughter in their house overlooking the cemetery. Immediately he becomes aware of the 'stink that creeps through the open window' and which he has even smelt on the breath of the local inhabitants and feels that, as a young man of ideas and ideals, he can conceive of this work as something worthy and serious. As he begins his task we gradually meet the curious characters who will populate his life for the duration. And these characters are the best part of Miller's work. For the rest, Baratte could be quoting Miller himself when he says, in a rather awkward sentence, 'what the world is doing, what it is readying itself for, he will attend to later'. But of course he never does.
Baratte is quite an interesting man, one absorbed by an identity crisis. Every night as he settles to sleep he asks himself, who am I, where do I come from, what are you, what do you believe in. He believes in the power of reason, a child of the Enlightenment, and this in the face of the madness of his work in the cemetery dealing with the thousands of bodies and bones who have lost all identity. He is conscious of his dignity, his scholarly achievements and his position in Normandy as the son of a master glover who also owns land. His attention to and care of his workers seems to be curiously out of joint with eighteenth century mores and I would question its veracity. Sometimes he seems as worthy as the NHS and Social Services rolled into one! He finds love and companionship with a gentle whore, Heloise, an accomplished autodidact who collects books.
This is a good story but unambitious with no great literary merit. A holiday read for next summer!
Sunday, November 13, 2011
The Marriage Plot ... triumph or disaster?
After two vigorous and haunting novels, Virgin Suicides and Middlesex, another Jeffrey Eugenides was an exciting prospect but The Marriage Plot is a rum do! There seems to be a lot more going on here than is immediately apparent in the deceptively simple narrative.
On the surface, it appears straightforward involving a triangle of students in their final year in Brown University in the eighties [Eugenides' own alma mater]. Madeleine is pretty, WASP, rich, an English major student with a passion for the works of Austen, James and Eliot. Her final year dissertation centres on the marriage plots in their works. However, in the course of the year she began hearing people dropping names like Derrida, Foucault, Baudrillard and, intrigued, she signs up for a Semiotics module where she meets the second of our protagonists, the love of her life, Leonard. Leonard is a Biology and Philosophy major, poor, of humble origins and, as we discover, a manic depressive. Madeleine, however, is smitten, to the distress of her 'treasured friend' Mitchell Grammaticus, a religion major, who is totally devoted to both God and Madeleine, convinced that one day she will be his.
The book opens on Graduation Day when Madeleine is going to confront her parents with her decision to go with Leonard to Cape Cod where he has secured a research fellowship in a lab and to cohabit with him. Mitchell is more than unhappy with this decision but still considers God is on his side in the long term and is planning to take the obligatory year out with the standard tour of Europe and India where - if you're into religion - they have everything. The book goes forward then with the progresss of the three over the following year.
Madeleine is given the lion's share of the narrative and Eugenides tells it convincingly in a well constructed manner. Nevertheless, his treatment of her is shallow in many respects. While Leonard and Mitchell pretty much limp from day to day, Madeleine has a firm plan and is applying to graduate school with a definite project on Victorian novelists in mind. We hear nothing however of her progress with her work and Eugenides occupies himself almost entirely with her relationship with Leonard and, to a lesser degree, with Mitchell. At the same time, there is no 'marriage plot' as such. Rather, underlying the story, is a polemic against modernism and the seeming pretentiousness of students taken with the new philosophers of semiotics and deconstruction. He pokes fun at a student who ridicules the idea that a book should be 'about' anything. At her first class meeting in semiotics, eight of the ten students showed up in black t-shirts and ripped black jeans, one with his eyebrows shaved off! It seems that Eugenides is turning his back on the inventiveness of his earlier work and the idea of experimentation in favour of social realism and the traditional narrative. Perhaps this is one of the reasons why the character of Madeleine is drawn with such empathy. In a recent interview with Eileen Battersby, Eugenides said he loved the 19th century novels and it does seem as that is what he trying to achieve with this work. But the 19th century novels worked because they reflected the zeitgeist of the time and the institution of marriage was a commitment of a totally different nature from today. To impose such a structure on the mores of the 21st century does not convince which possibly explains the ending.
Eugenides tells his story with in a straightforward fashion - more Updike than Franzen - and he tells it well. His characters are likeable, even the self-destructing Leonard - but it lacks the originality of both Virgin Suicides and Middlesex. It is not a little autobiographical including not only his time in Brown but also his own stint working with Mother Teresa in Calcutta from whom Mitchell eventually flees! One could almost forgive him - but not quite - for his diatribe against Europeans who, he claims in one section, had produced no decent rock music of their own and 'whose relationship to the sixties ... was essentially spectatorial'. I know some French and German students who might heartily disagree!
It is an easy read but it is not a literary masterpiece sadly.
On the surface, it appears straightforward involving a triangle of students in their final year in Brown University in the eighties [Eugenides' own alma mater]. Madeleine is pretty, WASP, rich, an English major student with a passion for the works of Austen, James and Eliot. Her final year dissertation centres on the marriage plots in their works. However, in the course of the year she began hearing people dropping names like Derrida, Foucault, Baudrillard and, intrigued, she signs up for a Semiotics module where she meets the second of our protagonists, the love of her life, Leonard. Leonard is a Biology and Philosophy major, poor, of humble origins and, as we discover, a manic depressive. Madeleine, however, is smitten, to the distress of her 'treasured friend' Mitchell Grammaticus, a religion major, who is totally devoted to both God and Madeleine, convinced that one day she will be his.
The book opens on Graduation Day when Madeleine is going to confront her parents with her decision to go with Leonard to Cape Cod where he has secured a research fellowship in a lab and to cohabit with him. Mitchell is more than unhappy with this decision but still considers God is on his side in the long term and is planning to take the obligatory year out with the standard tour of Europe and India where - if you're into religion - they have everything. The book goes forward then with the progresss of the three over the following year.
Madeleine is given the lion's share of the narrative and Eugenides tells it convincingly in a well constructed manner. Nevertheless, his treatment of her is shallow in many respects. While Leonard and Mitchell pretty much limp from day to day, Madeleine has a firm plan and is applying to graduate school with a definite project on Victorian novelists in mind. We hear nothing however of her progress with her work and Eugenides occupies himself almost entirely with her relationship with Leonard and, to a lesser degree, with Mitchell. At the same time, there is no 'marriage plot' as such. Rather, underlying the story, is a polemic against modernism and the seeming pretentiousness of students taken with the new philosophers of semiotics and deconstruction. He pokes fun at a student who ridicules the idea that a book should be 'about' anything. At her first class meeting in semiotics, eight of the ten students showed up in black t-shirts and ripped black jeans, one with his eyebrows shaved off! It seems that Eugenides is turning his back on the inventiveness of his earlier work and the idea of experimentation in favour of social realism and the traditional narrative. Perhaps this is one of the reasons why the character of Madeleine is drawn with such empathy. In a recent interview with Eileen Battersby, Eugenides said he loved the 19th century novels and it does seem as that is what he trying to achieve with this work. But the 19th century novels worked because they reflected the zeitgeist of the time and the institution of marriage was a commitment of a totally different nature from today. To impose such a structure on the mores of the 21st century does not convince which possibly explains the ending.
Eugenides tells his story with in a straightforward fashion - more Updike than Franzen - and he tells it well. His characters are likeable, even the self-destructing Leonard - but it lacks the originality of both Virgin Suicides and Middlesex. It is not a little autobiographical including not only his time in Brown but also his own stint working with Mother Teresa in Calcutta from whom Mitchell eventually flees! One could almost forgive him - but not quite - for his diatribe against Europeans who, he claims in one section, had produced no decent rock music of their own and 'whose relationship to the sixties ... was essentially spectatorial'. I know some French and German students who might heartily disagree!
It is an easy read but it is not a literary masterpiece sadly.
This week they said ...
What joy! Nicholas Lezard has discovered What Ever Happened to Modernism? by Gabriel Josipovici. Followers of my blog may remember that I have several times referred - and deferred - to this amazing work of literary criticism over the past year. Lezard rues how the Booker shortlist went horribly wrong this year having been 'on the point of recognising the influence of modernism' last year with Tom McCarthy's C. As he points out, the modernist canon has been around too long to deserve the sideswipes it receives from the likes of Amis. Read his piece in full in last Saturday's Guardian Review, p.19.
This was followed by Robert McCrum [today's Observer, 13 November, Review section, p. 42] recognising that English fiction 'is in the doldrums' and opining that the 'cultural recession mirrors the economic downturn'. In his opinion, the book market promotes quantity before quality producing what he terms the Ikea novel. 'Ikea novels are the kind of fiction that comes direct from the factory, with no intercession of craftsmanship or artistry en route to the consumer'. It has all the ingredients of a novel but is a simulacrum of fine writing. 'Ikea fiction is not original, and not distinctive, with no inner vision or humanity'.
Its reassuring to know that my criticisms of the gods of the English literary scene are not totally off base.
This was followed by Robert McCrum [today's Observer, 13 November, Review section, p. 42] recognising that English fiction 'is in the doldrums' and opining that the 'cultural recession mirrors the economic downturn'. In his opinion, the book market promotes quantity before quality producing what he terms the Ikea novel. 'Ikea novels are the kind of fiction that comes direct from the factory, with no intercession of craftsmanship or artistry en route to the consumer'. It has all the ingredients of a novel but is a simulacrum of fine writing. 'Ikea fiction is not original, and not distinctive, with no inner vision or humanity'.
Its reassuring to know that my criticisms of the gods of the English literary scene are not totally off base.
Tuesday, October 18, 2011
Booker Prize 2011: RESULT!
I have broken my own record! After years of unfailingly wrong guessing the result, I have finally got it right! Well done, Julian Barnes. Literature triumphs! As he himself said, Sense of an Ending is a beautiful book - beautiful to look at he meant. But it is also a beautiful book to read. Go for it!
Wednesday, October 12, 2011
Booker Prize 2011?
The result of the jury in the 2011 Man Booker Prize will be announced next Tuesday 18 October and I have been slow to keep up to date with the short list. As always, the list is controversial and omits some biggies - though I must agree with the decision to drop Hollinghurst and Barry, neither of whose books represent their best. The full list for anyone who missed it is: Sense of an Ending [Julian Barnes], The Sisters Brothers [De Witt], Halfs Blood Blues [Edugyan], Jamrach's Menagerie [Carol Birch], Pigeon English [Kelman] and Snowdrops [Miller]. I have already reviewed at length Sense of an Ending which, if there is any justice out there, should win - but then I have never guessed accurately the winner of the Booker!
If there should be a different book chosen, I could not argue about The Sisters Brothers. This is a book to give one pause and reverse many long held opinions. This is a Western! And I have to say that I was as far outside my comfort zone as I could be when I started reading it. Patrick deWitt is a Canadian, born in British Columbia, though now living in Oregon. This is his second novel and it is set in Oregon and California in 1851 around the time of the gold rush in the Sierra Nevada and the Coen Brothers must surely film it! I have to say that I never imagined I would find myself rooting for two psychopaths - but I did!
The two psychopaths are Eli and Charlie Sisters, hired killers, who are on a job taking them from Oregon to California and the book is, on the one hand, the story of that odyssey, the characters they meet on route and the events that occur, all told in a dead-pan, in-your-face manner, at times weirdly humorous; and, on the other, it is an almost spiritual odyssey for the younger brother, Eli, who is considering quitting his 'career' to open a trading post. The brothers' reputation precedes them and at every stop they only have to mention their names to secure instant fear and respect. Inevitably, they are challenged from time to time but always at the cost to the challenger. The story is narrated by Eli and, consequently, we are party to his laboured arguments with himself and his relationship with his brother. He is greatly attached to his horse and takes utmost pains to look after him in contrast to his easy acceptance of the deaths of various men en route. Indeed, the wonders of a tooth brush and tooth powder to which he is introduced by one character, a dentist, is more noteworthy than the deaths of four men who refused to loan Charlie their axe.
The 'job' takes an unexpected turn - enough of a spoiler! deWitt's writing is lucid and flowing. He eschews any descriptions of the landscape through which the brothers pass in favour of character development which is gripping. His language is particular and the dialogue appropriate to the period but beautifully phrased. At one point, a whore with whom Charlie has spent the night remarks to Eli, 'you got all the romantic blood, is that it?' to which Eli replies, 'our blood is the same, we just use it differently' which neatly encapsulates the gradually widening fissure between the brothers.
If you think Westerns finished with the Coen Brothers True Grit, think again! Just read it and see!
On the other hand, if you never get to read Jamrach's Menagerie by Carol Birch don't worry. It is neither as magical or 'completely original' as A.S. Byatt maintains on the jacket cover. As a blurb on the back says, this is Dickens meets Moby Dick but I think if you want either, then read a Dickens novel or Moby Dick. The book was also longlisted for the Orange Prize so is clearly highly considered by some. I found the narrative uneven, at times tedious, and the conclusion disappointing if obvious. In its favour, I was relieved that Ms Birch did not try to emulate cockney slang or any dialect in her writing sticking to plain English with no anachronisms.
Without wanting to spoil the story, should you read it, there is one particularly interesting and well described section but at the same time, it has been done equally well elsewhere and is not original. The narrative is told by a Jaffy Brown, a cockney, who goes to sea as a teenager on a whaling ship with an extra purpose, that of capturing and bringing back a 'dragon' as they term an extremely large member of the lizard family, for Jaffy's employer, a certain Mr Jamrach who deals in exotic animals. His best friend, Tim accompanies him and the narrative describes their life on board which has none of the usual hardships associated with sailing in Victorian times in that they have a kind captain and friendly crew. The events at sea form the core of the story.
A tour de force this is not.
Half Blood Blues by another Canadian, Esi Edugyan, is a better read altogether. I have to admit the jacket and story blurb at the back of it put me off initially but I am glad I persisted despite them. Edugyan is a product of John Hopkins Writing Seminars from which she has a Masters in Writing and, I would guess, some expertise in jazz and music groups. Or else, she did some very good research.
The narrative concerns a jazz group formed in Berlin in the thirties three of whom escape to France but get trapped again there with the fall of Paris in 1940. The story is told by one of the group, Sid Griffiths, and deals primarily with him, his friend Chip Jones and the star of the group, a young black German, Hieronymous Falk. It moves between the events of that time and the early nineties when Chip and Sid return to Berlin and Poland following receipt of a mysterious letter that seems to indicate that Hiero is still alive.
Though I am often a little wary of the products of creative writing courses, this is a beautifully written novel with just the right element of suspense. The music scenes are well described with great veracity including the trials and heartache of cutting a record in the forties and Edugyan appears to have a genuine feel for the rhythms of jazz which percolate the novel. The intonations and language of her characters are perfect and she captures the atmosphere of Paris during the 'phony war' with great delicacy and skill. Definitely worth a read.
Pigeon English by Stephen Kelman still awaits me. Snowdrops by AD Miller does not appeal. Though well written as one might expect by a long time contributor to The Economist, the story falls short of what might be expected on the Booker List. It is a crime story set in Putin's Russia with elements of Bond and, as the Guardian review said, 'standard issue characters' in a Russia that one can happily think the worst of. Not my cup of tea!
If there should be a different book chosen, I could not argue about The Sisters Brothers. This is a book to give one pause and reverse many long held opinions. This is a Western! And I have to say that I was as far outside my comfort zone as I could be when I started reading it. Patrick deWitt is a Canadian, born in British Columbia, though now living in Oregon. This is his second novel and it is set in Oregon and California in 1851 around the time of the gold rush in the Sierra Nevada and the Coen Brothers must surely film it! I have to say that I never imagined I would find myself rooting for two psychopaths - but I did!
The two psychopaths are Eli and Charlie Sisters, hired killers, who are on a job taking them from Oregon to California and the book is, on the one hand, the story of that odyssey, the characters they meet on route and the events that occur, all told in a dead-pan, in-your-face manner, at times weirdly humorous; and, on the other, it is an almost spiritual odyssey for the younger brother, Eli, who is considering quitting his 'career' to open a trading post. The brothers' reputation precedes them and at every stop they only have to mention their names to secure instant fear and respect. Inevitably, they are challenged from time to time but always at the cost to the challenger. The story is narrated by Eli and, consequently, we are party to his laboured arguments with himself and his relationship with his brother. He is greatly attached to his horse and takes utmost pains to look after him in contrast to his easy acceptance of the deaths of various men en route. Indeed, the wonders of a tooth brush and tooth powder to which he is introduced by one character, a dentist, is more noteworthy than the deaths of four men who refused to loan Charlie their axe.
The 'job' takes an unexpected turn - enough of a spoiler! deWitt's writing is lucid and flowing. He eschews any descriptions of the landscape through which the brothers pass in favour of character development which is gripping. His language is particular and the dialogue appropriate to the period but beautifully phrased. At one point, a whore with whom Charlie has spent the night remarks to Eli, 'you got all the romantic blood, is that it?' to which Eli replies, 'our blood is the same, we just use it differently' which neatly encapsulates the gradually widening fissure between the brothers.
If you think Westerns finished with the Coen Brothers True Grit, think again! Just read it and see!
On the other hand, if you never get to read Jamrach's Menagerie by Carol Birch don't worry. It is neither as magical or 'completely original' as A.S. Byatt maintains on the jacket cover. As a blurb on the back says, this is Dickens meets Moby Dick but I think if you want either, then read a Dickens novel or Moby Dick. The book was also longlisted for the Orange Prize so is clearly highly considered by some. I found the narrative uneven, at times tedious, and the conclusion disappointing if obvious. In its favour, I was relieved that Ms Birch did not try to emulate cockney slang or any dialect in her writing sticking to plain English with no anachronisms.
Without wanting to spoil the story, should you read it, there is one particularly interesting and well described section but at the same time, it has been done equally well elsewhere and is not original. The narrative is told by a Jaffy Brown, a cockney, who goes to sea as a teenager on a whaling ship with an extra purpose, that of capturing and bringing back a 'dragon' as they term an extremely large member of the lizard family, for Jaffy's employer, a certain Mr Jamrach who deals in exotic animals. His best friend, Tim accompanies him and the narrative describes their life on board which has none of the usual hardships associated with sailing in Victorian times in that they have a kind captain and friendly crew. The events at sea form the core of the story.
A tour de force this is not.
Half Blood Blues by another Canadian, Esi Edugyan, is a better read altogether. I have to admit the jacket and story blurb at the back of it put me off initially but I am glad I persisted despite them. Edugyan is a product of John Hopkins Writing Seminars from which she has a Masters in Writing and, I would guess, some expertise in jazz and music groups. Or else, she did some very good research.
The narrative concerns a jazz group formed in Berlin in the thirties three of whom escape to France but get trapped again there with the fall of Paris in 1940. The story is told by one of the group, Sid Griffiths, and deals primarily with him, his friend Chip Jones and the star of the group, a young black German, Hieronymous Falk. It moves between the events of that time and the early nineties when Chip and Sid return to Berlin and Poland following receipt of a mysterious letter that seems to indicate that Hiero is still alive.
Though I am often a little wary of the products of creative writing courses, this is a beautifully written novel with just the right element of suspense. The music scenes are well described with great veracity including the trials and heartache of cutting a record in the forties and Edugyan appears to have a genuine feel for the rhythms of jazz which percolate the novel. The intonations and language of her characters are perfect and she captures the atmosphere of Paris during the 'phony war' with great delicacy and skill. Definitely worth a read.
Pigeon English by Stephen Kelman still awaits me. Snowdrops by AD Miller does not appeal. Though well written as one might expect by a long time contributor to The Economist, the story falls short of what might be expected on the Booker List. It is a crime story set in Putin's Russia with elements of Bond and, as the Guardian review said, 'standard issue characters' in a Russia that one can happily think the worst of. Not my cup of tea!
Thursday, September 15, 2011
The Sense of an Ending [Julian Barnes]
This has to be one of the saddest books I have ever read, It is an attack on the smugness of youth and the complacency of old age. It is a warning that our early actions can come back to haunt us. Cliches are after all founded on truth.
It is the story of a man, Tony Webster, who is comfortably retired, amicably divorced with one safely married daughter, who takes pleasure in history and music, keeping his apartment well maintained and volunteering in the local hospital library once a week. His only close friend appears to be his divorced wife but he seems perfectly content with this. Though he admits to moments of self-pity, he thinks that 'we end up all belonging to the same category, that of the non-young' and claims 'I've never much minded this myself'. He says that 'I rarely ended up fantasising a markedly different life from the one that has been mine'. He is not odd enough not to have done the things he ended up doing with his life and he neither looks back or obsesses about death. Though Barnes has written on death, this novel is not about death though three deaths occur and it is the third of these that leads to a cataclysmic result for Tony.
The novel is divided into two parts. In the first part, Webster is a callow sixth-former, one of a trio who draw into their clique a new-comer, the intellectual and clever Adrian Finn. They were - as Tony at age 65 remembers - 'book-hungry, sex-hungry, meritocratic, anarchistic. All political and social systems appeared to us corrupt, yet we declined to consider an alternative other than hedonistic chaos'. In other words, they were the pretentious children of the sixties with a fear that life wouldn't turn out to be like literature and, as Barnes writes, 'most people didn't experience the Sixties until the Seventies'. The group splits up when school ends and they go their separate ways, Tony to university in Bristol and Adrian to Cambridge. At Bristol, Tony gets into a relationship, fraught at times, with Veronica Ford, a wayward and opinionated young woman. When Tony takes her to London to meet with his friends, Veronica is clearly taken with Adrian who is fulfilling his early promise successfully in Cambridge. Tony's relationship with Veronica does not last his time in Bristol but its effects and reverberations are to impinge greatly on his life.
In the second part, Webster is now 65 and retired when an extraordinary event catapults Veronica back into his life. He receives a lawyer's letter regarding a small bequest which becomes the source of agonizing memory searches and a re-evaluation of his entire life.
It is hard to believe that this small book is only 150 pages long so replete is it with ideas, philosophy and subtle - and not so subtle - aphorisms. Barnes has excelled himself with this one. One critic has compared it with Chesil Beach where the backgrounds and characters are not dissimilar but perhaps it would be truer to say that this is the book that McEwan would like to have written. The main character, Tony Webster, is beautifully drawn. Barnes develops Tony's character with deftness so we are remarkedly at ease with the accumulation of events in his life and his thought processes. Though this book, as I said, is not about death but about life, I can't do better than quote John Self who said, in his review of the book, 'Death, getting close every day, is always personal. In Frank Kermode’s work of literary criticism from which Barnes takes his title, “the sense of an ending” refers to apocalypticism, the end of the world. Barnes’s concern here is far more serious than that'.
It is the story of a man, Tony Webster, who is comfortably retired, amicably divorced with one safely married daughter, who takes pleasure in history and music, keeping his apartment well maintained and volunteering in the local hospital library once a week. His only close friend appears to be his divorced wife but he seems perfectly content with this. Though he admits to moments of self-pity, he thinks that 'we end up all belonging to the same category, that of the non-young' and claims 'I've never much minded this myself'. He says that 'I rarely ended up fantasising a markedly different life from the one that has been mine'. He is not odd enough not to have done the things he ended up doing with his life and he neither looks back or obsesses about death. Though Barnes has written on death, this novel is not about death though three deaths occur and it is the third of these that leads to a cataclysmic result for Tony.
The novel is divided into two parts. In the first part, Webster is a callow sixth-former, one of a trio who draw into their clique a new-comer, the intellectual and clever Adrian Finn. They were - as Tony at age 65 remembers - 'book-hungry, sex-hungry, meritocratic, anarchistic. All political and social systems appeared to us corrupt, yet we declined to consider an alternative other than hedonistic chaos'. In other words, they were the pretentious children of the sixties with a fear that life wouldn't turn out to be like literature and, as Barnes writes, 'most people didn't experience the Sixties until the Seventies'. The group splits up when school ends and they go their separate ways, Tony to university in Bristol and Adrian to Cambridge. At Bristol, Tony gets into a relationship, fraught at times, with Veronica Ford, a wayward and opinionated young woman. When Tony takes her to London to meet with his friends, Veronica is clearly taken with Adrian who is fulfilling his early promise successfully in Cambridge. Tony's relationship with Veronica does not last his time in Bristol but its effects and reverberations are to impinge greatly on his life.
In the second part, Webster is now 65 and retired when an extraordinary event catapults Veronica back into his life. He receives a lawyer's letter regarding a small bequest which becomes the source of agonizing memory searches and a re-evaluation of his entire life.
It is hard to believe that this small book is only 150 pages long so replete is it with ideas, philosophy and subtle - and not so subtle - aphorisms. Barnes has excelled himself with this one. One critic has compared it with Chesil Beach where the backgrounds and characters are not dissimilar but perhaps it would be truer to say that this is the book that McEwan would like to have written. The main character, Tony Webster, is beautifully drawn. Barnes develops Tony's character with deftness so we are remarkedly at ease with the accumulation of events in his life and his thought processes. Though this book, as I said, is not about death but about life, I can't do better than quote John Self who said, in his review of the book, 'Death, getting close every day, is always personal. In Frank Kermode’s work of literary criticism from which Barnes takes his title, “the sense of an ending” refers to apocalypticism, the end of the world. Barnes’s concern here is far more serious than that'.
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