Saturday, June 23, 2012

The Sense of an Ending

  Note: I'm not going to do a single bit of summary.  If anyone out there hasn't read The Sense of an Ending by Julian Barnes (which, btw, won the Man Booker prize for 2011) this may or may not make sense.  I hope you read it: it is worthwhile and very fast. 

    I'm quite sure I am not the first to note that Julian Barnes' The Sense of an Ending engages with Ian McEwan's much-acclaimed ("and now, a major motion picture") Atonement.  Before I run off and read some critical reviews, I would like to engage in some speculation on my own.   I would call The Sense of an Ending a rebuttal to the wild narrative speculations of McEwan's narrator, Briony.  Briony's (and McEwan's? Where is the line between the author and the authored here?) ability to invent and lie, is in part, the result of her failure of moral imagination. McEwan's considerable skill in constructing and manipulating a narrative and a narrator are inextricably linked for me in this failure.  For many readers, as I know I am not alone in this, Atonement was an infuriating read.  I should ponder that further. But on to Barnes.
  Barnes seeks an antidote to this, I think. Ending's narrator, Tony Webster, has another sort of reconstruction of the past going on---it is a reconstruction most of us are likely to recognize. Our own version of events, our perceptions, are centered on our own emotions and reactions, and likely we put ourselves at the focus of the action, as the locus of attention, the butt of jokes and slights that may or may not be directed at us. This is human nature and it is particularly embedded in the young: it is all about me. If it isn't, then it ought to be. What Barnes forces the reader to do---or at least forced this reader to do--is to consider, with care, what exactly of our memories is selected by us, and how we interpret those memories. How, to flip the equation on its head, are others affected as the result of that self-centering of perception and emotion, particularly when they suffer the from the same solipsism?   Am I even using that in the best sense here?
   Webster's look back at a series of past events and his reassessment of his own character are illuminating in every sense. What senses are those? You tell me; I can only report how personally this affected me, and that isn't use to anyone. This is a wonderful read, though. Ruminative, melancholic, and graceful, Barnes' writing is smooth and elegant. The structure of the book is also elegant, and straightforward: part one is Webster's retelling of said past events and part two is the present day reassessment, as the past comes to life in some unexpected ways. Tony Webster tries to understand, fails, tries again, succeeds, and comprehends his failure. Perhaps apprehends his failure is a better word choice. To whit:

We live with such easy assumptions, don't we?  For instance, that memory equals events plus time.  but it's all much odder than this.  Who was it said that memory is what we thought we'd forgotten?  And it ought to be obvious to us that time doesn't act as a fixative, rather as a solvent.  But it's not convenient--it's not useful--to believe this; it doesn't help us get on with our lives; so we ignore it.

     This ruminative quality is interspersed with narrative. We have event; we have contemplation.  The result is a seamless, sublime reading experience that goes all too fast. I found myself slowing down, just to savor and reread sections. Will it hold up? I don't know.
     Barnes argues for the end of solipsism (if he's making an argument at all--my own discussion here may just be more of that).  He does it compactly and beautifully; it is a lovely novel.  If I am to read this novel as engaging with the moral vision of Atonement then I would argue that McEwan (excuse me, Briony) affirms the truth of solipsism. Or perhaps I am reading McEwan all wrong, and Briony's paucity of moral and ethical imagining is supposed to irritate the hell out of me, and that was his point.  McEwan is so skilled that I read it all as narrative pyrotechnics, though, and that is where I conflate the narrator with the author. Perhaps that is the final conundrum here, and I am, finally, guilty of that which I set out to condemn.