












































[Expositions 6.1 (2012) 45–47]  Expositions (online) ISSN: 1747–5376 

Barnes, Julian. The Sense of an Ending. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2011. 163 pp, E-book, 
$11.99, eISBN: 978–0–307–95733–7. 

 
My ladies’ book club has been together for twelve years and I believe we can probably count on 
one hand how many of those books we have all completed. Life is busy. Some of us have 
children, terminally ill parents, and demanding careers. And some months the pick is such a 
tedious read or the plot so circuitous that we can’t properly follow it when we get those twenty 
minutes to read before bedtime, so we close the book.  

Julian Barnes’ The Sense of an Ending was the first book we all finished in a very long time. 
When we met to discuss the book we did not linger over the wine and cheese selection, filling 
the room with our usual (and oftentimes quite entertaining) “catch up” time. We grabbed a glass 
and a plate and made our way to our host’s living room. Our talk began, naturally, with the 
ending. But that’s never a good place to start a book review. 

I once studied with an English professor who said one should NEVER pose the question: 
What is this book about? Her theory was that it diminished the work’s complexity and multiple 
meanings; it was an insult to author and reader to reduce a work of art to a bullet list. The joy of 
Barnes’ brief novel (163 pages – no doubt an incentive to finish; it’s novella-like), if I might 
contradict my dear and wise former professor, is that one is urged to return to enduring universal 
themes of school days, family, the search for love, the sting of loss, the quest for answers, and 
the recognition that our memories are really fiction, no matter how hard we try to convince 
ourselves otherwise.  

Tony Webster is our narrator, a likable and unreliable narrator, a British man who came of age 
in the 1960s, read History at Bristol, married, had a child, divorced, and now finds himself in his 
later years reflecting on where and who he has been. “Average, that’s what I’d been, ever since I 
left school. Average at university and work; average in friendship, loyalty, love; average, no 
doubt at sex . . . Average at life; average at truth; morally average” (110). This late-in-life 
assessment has been prompted by an unexpected piece of mail from a former girlfriend’s mother. 
The woman has left Tony with a check for five hundred pounds and the diary of an old school 
friend who committed suicide in his early 20s. But the diary promised from the solicitor’s letter 
is not part of the package.  

The novel is nearly evenly divided into Parts “One” and “Two.” One might be tempted while 
reading to think “Then” and “Now” though Barnes’ narrator is playing with memory, the way 
memory plays with us all. Tony is past middle age from the very first page, then young, then 
older, young again . . . the trick of memory and its fluidity. We are a sixty-five-year-old retiree at 
the shops getting butter and milk and then we are a young schoolboy scraping our knees from a 
fall on the way home from school, all in a blink. When reflecting on a letter sent as a youth to his 
ex-girlfriend’s new suitor, Tony says, “I must stress that this is my reading now of what 
happened then. Or rather, my memory now of my reading then of what was happening at the 
time” (45). (Right. All clear.) Tony has told us that he sent the letter and kept no copy. This letter, 
of course, appears in full near the end of the novel and while I wouldn’t say it sheds 



The Sense of an Ending  46 
 

 

extraordinary new insights into Tony’s character, for a moment he might be considered a notch 
below his own “average” assessment. The new boyfriend of his old flame Veronica is none other 
than one of his best mates at school, Adrian. Adrian is the author of the diary that was promised 
to Tony from Veronica’s mother in her will, but never arrived in the package along with the 
check for five hundred pounds. (Following?)  

While I was intrigued by figuring out the twists and turns of this novel, I must say I kept 
underlining Barnes’ wonderful and dear moments he gave his character Tony, who laments the 
dying art of letter writing as he types another email to Veronica in hopes to convince her to turn 
over Adrian’s diary and is slightly pained when his one child, Susie, tells him it would be so 
much easier to communicate if he just learned how to text. Here is a man who misses 
conversation, even at its most banal. In a pub, with the bartender while ordering food: 

 
 “Do you think you could do me thin chips for a change?” 
 “How do you mean?” 
 “You know, like in France – the thin ones.” 
 “No, we don’t do them.” 
 “But it says on the menu your chips are hand-cut.” 
 “Yes.” 
 “Well, can’t you cut them thinner?” 
 “Hand-cut chips means fat chips.” 
 “But if you hand cut chips, couldn’t you cut them thinner?” 
 “We don’t cut them. That’s how they arrive.”  
 “You don’t cut them on the premises?” 
 “That’s what I said.” (158) 
 

From the lost art of communication to the lost art of culinary care, our narrator longs for the past, 
but also quite clearly is wrestling with his own romanticized version of parts of that past.  

Barnes’ The Sense of an Ending is a clear tip of the hat to Frank Kermode’s 1966 literary 
theory text of the same name. While Kermode’s work attempts a connection between fictions 
and a focus on apocalyptic thought, Barnes’ novel is not concerned with the end of all time, but 
the end of Tony Webster’s time and whether he will or won’t get the diary to solve a life-long 
nagging concern (why did Adrian commit suicide?) and an ever-pressing current matter. (I won’t 
give this part away, as it really is the “ah ha” of the ending.)  

Tony’s words resonate with any reader of a certain age. “I remember a period in late 
adolescence when my mind would make itself drunk with images of adventurousness. This is 
how it will be when I grow up. I shall go there, do this, discover that, love her, and then her and 
her and her. I shall live as people in novels live and have lived” (102). Life is always going to be 
grander that it actually is and we think of these things the same way Tony does while he takes 
out the recycling or mows the lawn.  



47   Simmons 
 

 

I kept thinking of The Education of Henry Adams as I read The Sense of an Ending. I loathed 
the Adams text as an undergraduate and have remembered very little from it except that he skips 
the twenty years after his wife commits suicide. As a nineteen-year-old reader I was incredulous 
– How does one erase such a chapter in life? Tony Webster experiences his own memory 
erasures, most notably when courting his wife. (Veronica from his school days is conveniently 
left out of his narrative.) Barnes employs a time compression that also was reminiscent of The 
Education of Henry Adams. In the course of two pages, Tony reports he met and married 
Margaret, welcomed daughter Susie, bought a house, got a divorce, became a grandfather, and is 
now retired. He doesn’t waste time on the traditional domestic concerns of his life because that’s 
not what this story is about.  

And this story is about solving a mystery and coming to terms with life’s disappointments and 
unanswerable questions. Tony Webster is an early twenty-first century Everyman. He’s average 
and law-abiding, just like most of his readers. Kermode reminded his readers, “We hunger for 
ends and for crises” (Kermode 2000, 55). By this novel’s end the crises have indeed mounted, 
some of which are simply not surmountable.  

 
MARY BETH SIMMONS 

Villanova University 
 

Work Cited 
 
1. Kermode, Frank. 2000. The Sense of an Ending: Studies in the Theory of Fiction with a 

New Epilogue. Oxford: Oxford University Press. 
 


