An all too human story of great unrest

FICTION: The Sense of an EndingBy Julian Barnes, Cape, 150pp. £12.99

ADRIAN ALWAYS SEEMED to be that bit more intelligent, that bit more superior, perhaps even more heroic than his friends. Whatever it was that made him interesting, there was also the fact that he never complained about his parents, not even the fact that his mother had run away. He was certainly mysterious, different. Even the teachers knew that.

“In those days, we imagined ourselves as being kept in some kind of holding pen, waiting to be released into our lives. And when that moment came, our lives – and time itself – would speed up” recalls Tony Webster, now 60ish, middle class and middling, the ideal narrator. He is bright, but not too bright; likeable but not a saint; and a survivor confident that he has stumbled upon most, if not quite all of the answers. “We live in time – it holds us and moulds us – but I’ve never felt I understood it very well.”

Julian Barnes's 11th novel, his first since Arthur & George(2005) is his shortest save The Porcupine(1992) and also his finest, in a career in which Barnes the artist has always had to battle his cleverness, his facile ease and his impressive journalism. There have been defining moments though – such as Flaubert's Parrot(1984) and of course, the surprisingly warm and humane Arthur George, both novels that came close to winning the Booker Prize, a feat that The Sense of an Endingmay well achieve.

Tony is in a reflective mood as he looks back to his school days and the dramatic arrival of Adrian. “There had been three of us, and he now made the fourth. We hadn’t expected to add to our tight number: cliques and pairings had happened long before, and we were already beginning to imagine our escape from school into life.”

From the opening pages Tony establishes a wry, thoughtful tone which is sustained to the final sentence. Barnes brilliantly conveys a feeling of slow awakening upon an intelligent narrative that is as exact as a knife thrust to the heart. Tony has had plenty of time to think and to assess his responses, and more importantly, his lack of them. Most of all, though, Tony is caught in the act of piecing together all the clues and realises that he had missed some.

Adrian had quickly impressed his classmates with his enigmatic responses to the teachers. Tony and his pals, Alex and Colin, had reckoned that they were light years ahead of all of their peers until Adrian proved otherwise. Colin is busy dismissing his parents for a minor offence, namely their failure to see things his way: “You think they’re okay when you’re little, then you realise they’re just like...” and Adrian memorably butts in with “Henry III?” Tony has never forgotten that interruption, it was funny but it was also unnerving. “We were beginning to get used to his sense of irony; also to the fact that it might be turned against us as well.”

Then an unexpected tragedy surrounding the most unlikely boy at the school causes the foursome to readjust their theories. They finally escape to the next level of life, university and discovering girls. Tony has his first relationship with a strange siren named Veronica. It is not a romance, more of a test of wills. Then it takes a twist, as things do, and Tony acts less like a thwarted suitor and more like a peevish brat. The friends begin to drift apart and the mistakes multiply. Tony is summoned back from the US: “When I got home my mother gave me a stiff-armed, face-powdered hug, sent me off for a bath and cooked me what was still referred to as my ‘favourite dinner’, and which I accepted as such, not having updated her for a while . . . Afterwards, she handed me the very few letters that had arrived in my absence.”

This is a very English novel, in which the Englishness is important though not overpowering. Barnes takes his title from the name of Frank Kermode’s landmark text which was published in 1967. In it the critic explores the ways in which fiction makes sense of linear time. Barnes is instead demonstrating the cohesion of time, fact and understanding. Tony recalls once being asked by his history master to define history. What he had then cockily defined as “the lies of the victors” he has come to see as “the memories of the survivors, most of whom are neither victorious nor defeated”. This no man’s land state of being sums up Tony who has got through life; married, coped with his wife leaving him, kept in touch with his daughter, likes his grandchildren, manages to keep his house tidy and remembers to do the recycling.

Why is this novel so good? There are many reasons. Barnes, as ever, writes very well. Yet for all the style and irony, it is the depth of powerful feeling, the emotional intelligence, the taste of remorse that brings it so close to the best of John Updike.

One day another letter arrives, this one from a solicitor informing him that he has been left a small legacy by a woman he barely knew. But there is a catch, a far more important document has been withheld and Tony goes in pursuit of it. Sometimes a writer can make something unique and staggering out of the ordinary. Julian Barnes certainly has here, and it is not all that surprising considering that he is the novelist who wrote one of the most astonishing opening sequences in contemporary British fiction, when an airman flies into the dawn in Staring at the Sun(1986).

Truth eventually provides the missing clues for Tony and he is left asking: “What did I know of life, I who had lived so carefully? Who had neither won nor lost, but just let life happen to him . . . Who avoided being hurt and called it a capacity for survival? Who paid his bills, stayed on good terms with everyone as far as possible, for whom ecstasy and despair soon became just words once read in novels?”

Julian Barnes may well have written his best novel, he has certainly told a wonderful story that is all too human and all so real and, as Tony remarks, full of “great unrest”.

Eileen Battersby is Literary Correspondent of The Irish Times