"The Sense of an Ending" by Julian Barnes

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The Sense of an Ending, another Booker Prize winning novel that makes me wonder what the hype is all about.

The beginning is exceptionally bad: Julian Barnes offers completely decontexualised fragments from later parts of the book and dabbles in the philosophy of time perception, a theme pursued with slightly more success throughout the rest of the novel. 

The text recovers quickly from the unfortunate start. From the point of view of Tony, the narrator-main character, the story recounts early friendships and the time spent with his first girl friend during their time at University. Turning out to be an awkward character much later in life, it is not clear why the narrator treats Vanessa as if something had been seriously wrong with her from the very beginning. But that is a problem with the cast in general, whose chatters are simply asserted rather than developed, or explained. 

Their affair ends unhappily in that Vanessa happens to "trade up" by getting amorously involved with one of Tony's closest friends, Adrian the whiz-kid.

Soon after, Adrian commits suicide, and forty years later Tony's research seems to yield that Adrian and Vanessa are the parents of a mentally disabled child. 

Already retired, Tony receives a mysterious inheritance from Vanessa's mother, 500 quid and the title to Adrian's diary, which latter, however, Vanessa is refusing to hand over to him. He gets in touch with her, finding his interest in Vanessa renewed, an occasion for the author to demonstrate that memories are often uncertain. 

The end is muddled, but seems to amount to this: the disabled child is really Vanessa's brother rather than her child, her mother having given birth to a child at too old an age. 

That's the whole story.

Add to this the boring character of Tony, not an unlikeable chap, but still a perfect mediocrity, and all that remains on the credit side from reading this thankfully short novel is the enjoyment of an excellent writing style and lots of sketches, graphic, yet mostly unspectacular scenes, so skilfully drawn by an observant writer as to make readers like me drift off into pleasant meditations. A book that can do that does have a strong side.

Being muddled, the denouement is less than reader-friendly, disturbs the meditation, and fails to hold any remarkable insights. However, another strength of the book lies in introducing the reader, at least this reader, to the mindset of an unambitious grey mouse type of Mitläufer. All other characters are mere chess figures, while Tony's personality is rather comprehensively and convincingly portrayed. He reminds me strongly of Anthime.

I suspect Julian Barnes was awarded the Booker Prize in honour of having a long established reputation in the literary world, rather than for producing an outstanding piece of art.