It’s a shame The Sense of an Ending won the Booker. Not because the prize wasn’t deserved — based on that shortlist, I’m sure the judges made the right decision — but because I don’t think it shows its author in his best light.
In time, probably around now, people will forget the hoo-ha over the 2011 Man Booker Prize. No one will remember that X said her five-year-old could have come up with a better shortlist, or that Y told X to stop being such an elitist snob. And I worry that readers coming to Barnes afresh, assuming The Sense of an Ending to be his best book, will be disappointed.
Which would be sad because he’s a brilliant writer, the first modern grown-up novelist I really fell in love with. I couldn’t get enough of his cleverness, his sense of humour, his smooth, unshowy prose. A History of the World in 10½ Chapters and Flaubert’s Parrot are two of my favourite books.
The Sense of an Ending, however, is not a brilliant book. It’s far from dreadful — everything Barnes writes is readable — but it is slight and shallow. The narrator is boring. The other characters, and I use the term loosely, are more boring still. It has a silly plot and an even sillier ending: you put the book down with an almighty sense of “whaaaaat?” At first I thought it was because I hadn’t got the twist. But then I reread the last thirty pages, and the first thirty pages, and it turned out I had got it after all.
Then I thought I must have missed out on a literary allusion Barnes was making. In its themes and characters, The Sense of an Ending is reminiscent of Metroland, his first novel, which I found sweet but slightly pointless. A well-read friend explained this was because I hadn’t read Flaubert’s Education Sentimentale, which put me in my place. In his review for the Spectator, David Sexton points out that The Sense of an Ending — with its unreliable narrator and love triangle — appears to be a vague homage to The Good Soldier by Ford Madox Ford (one of Julian’s all-time faves). Learning this only made it worse. True, both narrators are supposed to be bores, but whereas Ford’s is endearing and compellingly exasperating, the unlikeable Tony Webster just sends you to sleep.
The book’s main weakness is its total lack of passion. You just don’t believe the infatuation with cardboard vixen Veronica or with smartypants Adrian. Why? Because Barnes feels nothing for these characters. The Sense of an Ending suffers from the same problems as his last two short-story collections, The Lemon Tree and Pulse. It is self-indulgent in its game-playing. It is infused with an off-putting sense of authorial superiority that may or may not be tongue-in-cheek. It is knowing without feeling.
These days Barnes’ writing only comes alive when he’s talking about himself, or a character based on himself, or about one of his many literary crushes. I enjoyed his book about death. His essay on Jules Renard in a recent London Review of Books was lovely, as was listening to him rhapsodising about The Good Soldier on the radio. Ford Madox Ford’s Cockatoo: now there’s a book I’d like to read.
Anna Baddeley is editor of The Omnivore.
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