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| Critical Analysis |
The novella divides into two parts, the first being Tony's memoir of "book-hungry, sex-hungry" sixth form days, and the painful failure of his first relationship at university, with the spiky, enigmatic Veronica. It's a lightly sketched portrait of awkwardness and repression at a time when yes, it was the 60s,
"but only for some people, only in certain parts of the country".
In one of the book's many slow-rumbling ironies, the second section undermines the veracity of these expertly drawn memories, as Tony reopens his relationship with Veronica, a woman he had previously edited out of his life story.
It was a "slightly odd thing", he cautiously admits, to pretend to his ex-wife when they first met that Veronica had never existed and then later give such a one-sided account of her that she's known within their marriage as "The Fruitcake".
Barnes builds a powerful atmosphere of shame and silence around the past as Tony tries to track down the elusive diary, which promises, as missing diaries tend to do, some revelation or closure. In a book obsessed with evidence and documentation – verification for unreliable, subjective memory – the most powerful depth charge turns out to be something forgotten yet irrefutable that Tony has kept from himself for 40 years. With it Barnes puts the rest of the narrative, and his unreliable yet sincere narrator, tantalisingly into doubt.
There's the atmosphere of a Roald Dahl short story to Tony's quest; the sense that, with enigmatic emails and mysterious meetings in the Oxford Street John Lewis brasserie, he is somehow being played or manipulated by others.
"You don't get it. You never did,"
Veronica tells him repeatedly. A secret permeates the text, heavily withheld. But this schematic element pales beside the emotional force of Tony's re-evaluation of the past, his rush of new memories in response to fresh perspectives, and the unsettling sense of the limits of self-knowledge.
As ever, Barnes excels at colouring everyday reality with his narrator's unique subjectivity, without sacrificing any of its vivid precision: only he could invest a discussion about hand-cut chips in a gastropub with so much wry poignancy.
With its patterns and repetitions, scrutinising its own workings from every possible angle, the novella becomes a highly wrought meditation on ageing, memory and regret. But it gives as much resonance to what is unknown and unspoken – lost to memory – as it does to the engine of its own plot. Fiction, Barnes writes in Nothing to Be Frightened Of,
"wants to tell all stories, in all their contrariness, contradiction and irresolvability".
The Sense of an Ending honours that impossible desire in a way that is novel, fertile and memorable.
Thank you.....
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