The Sense of an Ending

Jeff Turrentine, The Washington Post

‘With his characteristic grace and skill, Barnes manages to turn this cat-and-mouse game into something genuinely suspenseful, as Veronica reveals just enough information to make Tony desperate for more. A single page from the diary, which suggests a highly unusual suicide note structured along the lines of Wittgenstein’s Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, is all Veronica will allow him to see […] Tony — now a doting grandfather who’s amicably divorced from his wife and spends his days volunteering at a hospital library — is either too dense, or too something else, to connect the dots. And here, finally, is the central question Barnes poses in his novel: If it’s not mere thick-headedness that’s keeping Tony from seeing what actually happened back then, what is it?’

Jane Juska, The San Francisco Chronicle

‘What this book is about: the unreliability of the eyewitness account, the accumulation of evidence that over time forces Tony Webster to acknowledge the mistakes, the denials, the secrets of his own life and his responsibility for the lives of others. Everything he has believed about himself turns out to be irrelevant; everything he has forgotten is. How does one live with that? Uneasily, at best […] The Sense of an Ending is a page-turner, and when you finish you will return immediately to the beginning. Like Tony Webster, we need to make sense of an ending and look ahead to our own.’

Martin Rubin, The Los Angeles Times

‘Dim, un-glamorous Tony is the perfect complacent character to have his world shaken up and, with the unexpected arrival of a legacy — in part monetary but also including a tangible chunk of history — he duly sets about reevaluating his past. What he discovers in the course of this picaresque quest of self-examination upends his comfortable self-image and fundamentally reconfigures relationships to and among people he believed were only tangentially related to his life’s journey […] The emotional roller coaster ride that Tony Webster has taken with us perched on his shoulder has such heft and intensity that we feel we too have truly experienced his life-altering revision of what he mistakenly believed to be a humdrum existence.’

Peter Clothier, The Huffington Post

‘I wanted to like the narrator more than I did. Looking back on events from the perspective of approaching age, he’s too often self-pitying and obtuse. […] I was not much engaged, as others apparently were (the book was a NYT best seller) by the philosophical ramblings about time and the fragmentary nature of memory. I found little that was actually new and original in the treatment of a theme that has been with us, in modern literature, at least since Marcel Proust’s great masterpiece. I’m perhaps a little simple-minded about this, but it seemed to me that the book was rather more heavy on the ‘telling’ of the theme than on its ‘showing.’

Justine Jordan, The Guardian 

‘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 […] 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.’