The Sense of an Ending
by Julian Barnes
Summary
Tony Webster is retired, amicably divorced, and content in a way he mistakes for wisdom. Then a solicitor's letter arrives: the mother of a girlfriend from forty years ago has left him five hundred pounds and the diary of his school friend Adrian, who killed himself at twenty two. The diary is being withheld by the girlfriend, and Tony sets out to get it.
The first half is his account of school and university, told with the smooth confidence of a man who has narrated his own life to himself many times. The second half dismantles it. Documents surface, an old letter he wrote turns out to be considerably nastier than he remembered, and the reader watches a decent man discover he was not one.
It is short, about 150 pages, and the prose is deceptively easy. Barnes is doing something exact with an unreliable narrator who is not lying to you but to himself, and the final revelation has divided readers permanently between those who find it devastating and those who find it a trick.
Read it in one sitting if you can, then reread the first forty pages immediately. What Tony tells you at the start is all true and all arranged, and seeing the arrangement is the whole experience.
An excellent reading group book for exactly that reason, since half the room will have understood the ending differently from the other half. Readers who want warmth or likeable company should look elsewhere; Tony is neither. The book is barely 150 pages and Barnes wastes none of them.
Historical Context & Significance
The Sense of an Ending won the Booker Prize in 2011, at Julian Barnes's fourth appearance on the shortlist after Flaubert's Parrot, England England and Arthur and George.
Stella Rimington, the former director general of MI5 who chaired that year's judges, praised it as exquisitely written, subtly plotted and revealing new depths with each reading. Her panel had already caused an argument by saying it wanted books that "zip along" and talking about readability, which prompted a sustained row about whether the prize was lowering its standards and led directly to the founding of a rival award.
Barnes had been publicly dismissive of the Booker for years, calling it posh bingo, which made the eventual win a widely enjoyed piece of literary theatre. A film adaptation followed in 2017.