Julian Barnes’ The Sense of an Ending made a big splash in 2011, becoming an international bestseller and, in October, winning the Man Booker Prize. I love this author, who tends to take up philosophical themes, and I looked forward to reading it. The huge proliferation of professional reviews was to be expected (here’s a list on Barnes’ website), but what surprised me, noodling around the internet, was the ton of book blogger reviews and the long comment threads they inspired.Here’s the book blurb:
Tony Webster and his clique first met Adrian Finn at school. Sex-hungry and book-hungry, they navigated the girl drought of gawky adolescence together, trading in affectations, in-jokes, rumour and wit. Maybe Adrian was a little more serious than the others, certainly more intelligent, but they swore to stay friends forever. Until Adrian’s life took a turn into tragedy, and all of them, especially Tony, moved on and did their best to forget.
Now Tony is in middle age. He’s had a career and a marriage, a calm divorce. He gets along nicely, he thinks, with his one child, a daughter, and even with his ex-wife. He’s certainly never tried to hurt anybody. Memory, though, is imperfect. It can always throw up surprises, as a lawyer’s letter is about to prove. The unexpected bequest conveyed by that letter leads Tony on a dogged search through a past suddenly turned murky. And how do you carry on, contentedly, when events conspire to upset all your vaunted truths?
After reading the novel I recognized that two features of the ending would generate a lot of comment: (1) Barnes leaves open a number of plot and character questions (an issue I hope to take up in a later post), and (2) more importantly, framing the bulk of the novel as a kind of emotional mystery (the bequest referenced in the blurb). All throughout the novel, it’s clear that Tony is an unreliable narrator, but at the end, there is a “double twist” that forces the reader to view herself as unreliable (or too complacent), and begs for a revaluation of what has come before (I would call it Shyamalan-esque but that seems too critical, and not really apt). Reviewers have referred to the novella, and especially the end, as “harsh”, “disturbing”, and “unforgiving.”
***What I say in the rest of the post completely spoils the end.***
Here’s what happens, in a nice summary from the Telegraph review:
At the core of the novel is the memory of a weekend spent with Veronica’s family at their house in Kent. It is an unhappy memory. Her boorish father, her oafish brother, her enigmatic mother, all three in their different ways seem to have conspired with Veronica to make him feel uncomfortable, and it comes as no surprise that soon afterwards he and Veronica break up. But a few months later, Adrian writes from Oxford to tell Tony he and Veronica are now seeing one another. Tony takes it as badly as anyone might and breaks off his friendship with Adrian. Three months later, Adrian kills himself.
Tony lives his life, nurdling the memory of that weekend and of his frustrating time with Veronica through various relationships, a marriage, a family, a lifetime. Then Veronica’s mother dies, leaving Tony £500 and Adrian’s diary covering, one presumes, those last few months. Why? It is a mystery only the diary will answer, but Veronica has stolen it and so Tony is forced to deal with her, and in doing so, he comes to see not only the inadequacies of the remaining documentation, but also the imperfections of his memory.
Veronica is as chilly and hard to read as ever, never directly answering Tony’s questions about the diary. He is dogged, and she finally relents, telling him to meet her at “an unfamiliar Tube station in north London.” She then drives him to
“Look.” I looked. A small group of people were coming along the pavement towards my side of the car. I counted five of them. In front was a man who, despite the heat, was wearing layers of heavy tweed, including a waistcoat and a kind of deerstalker helmet. His jacket and hat were covered with metal badges, thirty or forty of them at a guess, some glinting in the sun; there was a watch chain slung between his waistcoat pockets. His expression was jolly: he looked like someone with an obscure function at a circus or fairground. Behind him came two men: the first had a black moustache and a kind of rolling gait; the second was small and malformed, with one shoulder much higher than the other—he paused to spit briefly into a front garden. And behind them was a tall, goofy fellow with glasses, holding the hand of a plump, Indianish woman.
Barnes, Julian (2011-10-05). The Sense of an Ending (p. 136). Random House, Inc.. Kindle Edition.
Tony can’t figure it out, so she drives around and parks again:
Then I saw them—whoever they were—coming towards me. That had been the point of the manoeuvre: to get ahead of them again. We were alongside a shop and a launderette, with a pub on the other side of the street. The man with the badges—“barker,” that was the word I’d been looking for, the cheery fellow at the entrance to a fairground booth who encourages you to step inside and view the bearded lady or two-headed panda—he was still leading. The other four were now surrounding the young man in shorts, so he was presumably with them. Some kind of care worker.
Barnes, Julian (2011-10-05). The Sense of an Ending (p. 138). Random House, Inc.. Kindle Edition.
He asks her who they are and why they are watching them, and she throws him out of the car. He tracks down the group at a local pub, and, when staring into the face of one of them, “the gangly bloke”, he realized this was Adrian’s son. He thinks back to the angry letter he wrote when he found out about Adrian’s and Veronica’s relationship:
part of me hopes you’ll have a child, because I’m a great believer in time’s revenge, yea unto the next generation and the next. See Great Art. But revenge must be on the right people, i.e. you two (and you’re not great art, just a cartoonist’s doodle). So I don’t wish you that. It would be unjust to inflict on some innocent foetus the prospect of discovering that it was the fruit of your loins, if you’ll excuse the poeticism.
Barnes, Julian (2011-10-05). The Sense of an Ending (p. 105). Random House, Inc.. Kindle Edition.
Now, realizing that they had a “damaged” child, he thinks:
Time’s revenge on the innocent foetus. I thought of that poor, damaged man turning away from me in the shop and pressing his face into rolls of kitchen towel and jumbo packs of quilted toilet tissue so as to avoid my presence. Well, his instinct had been a true one: I was a man against whom backs should be turned. If life did reward merit, then I deserved shunning.
Barnes, Julian (2011-10-05). The Sense of an Ending (pp. 151-152). Random House, Inc.. Kindle Edition.
Speculating about Veronica’s life in the decades since he has seen her, he wonders:
how long had she sacrificed her life for him, perhaps taking some crappy part-time job while he was at a special-needs school? And then, presumably, he had got bigger and harder to manage, and eventually the terrible struggle became too much, and she allowed him to be taken into care. Imagine what that must have felt like; imagine the loss, the sense of failure, the guilt. And here was I, complaining to myself when my daughter occasionally forgot to send me an email.
Barnes, Julian (2011-10-05). The Sense of an Ending (p. 152). Random House, Inc.. Kindle Edition.
Tony writes Veornica a letter, basically, of condolence and apology. Afterwards, he thinks:
I thought more often of Susie, and of the luck any parent has when a child is born with four limbs, a normal brain, and the emotional makeup that allows the child, the girl, the woman to lead any sort of life. May you be ordinary, as the poet once wished the newborn baby.
Barnes, Julian (2011-10-05). The Sense of an Ending (p. 157). Random House, Inc.. Kindle Edition.
The second “twist” comes when Tony realizes that the child’s mother is not Veronica, but Veronica’s mother Sarah. He remembers his aggressive, angry letter of decades ago to Adrian, in which he suggested Adrian “consult Veronica’s mother.” He realizes that Adrian must have done just that, and then engaged in an affair with her, a “dangerously late age” for a woman to have a child.
I found much to admire, and enjoy, in The Sense of an Ending. But I was uncomfortable with the way that popular, uninformed, and negative conceptions of disability figured into the “Oh my god! Tragic!” thud of the Big Reveal at the end. Please don’t mistake me: I get it that the tragedy of Tony’s life is not simply that he wrote a letter that may have led to the birth of a “damaged” child. If that is all I took away from this novella, I would be a poor reader, indeed.
But, as I experienced the novel, Tony’s realizations about his life are galvanized and given credence by the invocation of the figure of the dreaded disabled Other, the inchoate fear of producing such a being, a creature less than fully human, fit, at best, for that liminal transient existence of the circus or fairground (and thus it is no accident, on this interpretation, that they are never portrayed at rest, always moving, walking), the object of avoidance when possible, and pity when not, the subject of the shepherding and ministrations of care workers (or unpaid family members whose lives are, as Tony thinks of Veronica’s “sacrifice”, and “terrible struggle”, ruined by association), never an agent in his own life, a fact emphasized by the tendency to travel animal-like, in packs. The way that Adrian Jr.’s friends are portrayed, as a circus troupe, as speaking in muted whines, as loping and shuffling, as goofy, as funny, as mysterious in their very being as Tony’s life is to himself, borrowed heavily for its narrative impact from pernicious constructions of cognitive disability in our culture.
The idea that Adrian Jr.’s disability was “Time’s revenge on the innocent foetus” might have worked well for Tony’s growth as a character, but was especially problematic for me as a moral philosopher. The idea that disability is an evil visitation on an innocent child as a result of some adult’s sins is one I had hoped long discarded. Moreover, that turn of phrase reinforces the idea that the “person” (read: healthy aspects of the person) is what matters, while the “disability” is a part that should be minimized, denied, or ignored. These constructions, which frequently serve as literary shorthands, are typically created by the able bodied, most of whom have no need or desire to see whether they are apt (they aren’t), or assess the damage they perpetrate.
I teach bioethics to undergrad pre-med majors, and, as a group, they tend to view disability on what we call the medical model: as a deviation from health that needs fixing or preventing. On this view, the life of someone with a disability (and their family members) is an unrelenting nightmare, forever disrupted. Worse, that’s just the way it is. There’s no thought as to how the isolation, powerlessness, low status, and poverty that often attends disability might be the result of social attitudes, rather than an inevitable consequence of biology. My own view is that social arrangements play a large role in excluding people with disabilities from participating in many important aspects of a full human life (work, family, social life, etc.). I read and reread the end of The Sense of an Ending many times in an attempt to categorize Tony’s attitude towards disability as just another of the many facets of Tony’s personality that the author clearly wished to subject to serious, if empathetic, critique. But there was no way to do that without then minimizing the dramatic impact of the end of the novel, concluding with the lines: “There is accumulation. There is responsibility. And beyond these, there is unrest. There is great unrest.” My guess is that the “twist” ending to The Sense of An Ending has played a significant part in making this novel so widely read and discussed, and I’m just sorry that it had to rely on problematic constructions of disability to do so.
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This sounds like something I’d pitch at a wall, but maybe I’ll see if the library has it. Reading things from a disability rights perspective, even when they’re problematic failures, is good for me. They help me understand disability better so I can explain it to other people.
I am still reeling from the whole disability = punishment concept whether karmically on birth parents or how it constructs a PWD to be someone who is always other with no life of their own
@Ridley: Well, I like the author, and I liked the book. I do think it’s odd that of all his books, this one finally got him the Booker, because IMO it is not his best. If you read it, let me know if you see those passages the same way I did.
@Merrian: I found it very disturbing, and I wrote this post because I did not see this mentioned in mainstream reviews.
Heh. Some people still believe that, though. I’ve been told a few times that my disability was a divine punishment for what my biological parents did.
(I thought it was such a silly thing to say, so I didn’t take those comments seriously.)
Hm. I’m not entirely on board with that. I’m not sure if I’m misunderstanding you or that we see it differently.
When people look at a person with a disability, they only see the disability – they don’t see the person’s personality, moods and such Just the disability. So I’m not sure where and how ‘minimized, denied or ignored’ fits in this.
I mean, your excerpts of this novel show that even Tony of this novel doesn’t see beyond the son’s disability as he seems to make the disability all about the son, even when talking about Veronica in context of the son (special needs school, ‘an unrelenting nightmare, forever disrupted’ and all other aspects you’ve noted).
I don’t know if he’s wondered about the emotional relationship and interactions between mother and son in the novel, though? I’m willing to bet he didn’t.
So true. I wanted to like TV drama series American Horror Story, but I was put off that all ‘weird & creepy’ characters have disabilities (dwarfism, down syndrome, disfigurement, mental health issues, etc.) while ‘normal’ characters don’t. No TV review I found so far has raised this issue.
I find this is the case for fiction of all kinds as well. One time, a friend gave me a list of his top 20 favourite novels. All those books featured disability, one way or other, as a representation of fear, nightmare, karma (the ‘sins of fathers’ trope is particularly popular), social isolation, despair or black humour. I can’t remember most of the list now, but I do recall these:
Geek Love - Katherine Dunn (parents manipulate genes to create their children as ‘circus freaks’ to make money)
Crash - J.B. Ballard (amputees)
A Closed Book - Gilbert Adair (the protagonist of this crime novel is blind)
Regeneration - Pat Barker (soldiers with various mental health issues)
A Prayer for Owen Meany – John Irving (Owen has dwarfism)
He didn’t even notice this common thread until I brought it up. Odd.
Actually, isn’t there a memo for authors and scriptwriters that to win an award or an ocean of acclaim, one has to feature disability in their works somehow? I think so because a couple of years ago a colleague and I had worked out that 86% on TIME’s 100 best English-language novels* feature a disability.
(FWIW, top 10 popular disabilities in fiction: “deformity” (e.g. not specifically named), mental health issues (depression, shellshock, etc.), neurological disorders (Alzheimer’s, autism, locked-in syndrome, etc.), facial disfigurement, blindness, dwarfism, ectrodactyly (especially in cult literary fiction), albinism, deafness and genetic disorders (down syndrome, haemophilia, etc) in that order.)
*http://www.listsofbests.com/list/1977-100-best-english-language-novels-1923-present
Sorry for returning to this again. I think I now get what you meant, but it still doesn’t make sense. I think it’s because of my awareness that there seems a deep need in a society to have disabilities around, as a “reminder” for all to be compassionate, sympathetic and blah blah. It’s also used to show examples or guides. This is particularly true in cinema, fiction and other forms of entertainment.
I think when it’s part of a story (cinema, radio, book or whatever), it’s not minimised, denied or ignored. But in everyday life? Definitely minimised, denied or ignored. I think there’s where my confusion happened.
@Maili:
Of course they do. but I had hoped that maybe a writer as intelligent and sensitive about the human condition as Barnes would not thoughtlessly parrot this idea.
I thought of this point as I was writing it. I know how important it is to see a person with a disability rather than a disabled person. For anyone not familiar with what Maili is talking about, here’s a common instruction:
However, I don’t think Barnes was using “people first” language in the text. The way disability was constructed in this text was to make the disability an alien visitation, and that’s what I was objecting to. the way Barnes constructed it, there was no way a disabled person could ever say things that suggest the “disability” is an important part of their sense of self, like:
I don’t know if this helps. I totally agree with you that my point and person first language seem to be in tension.
I’m really sad to know this, but not exactly shocked.
Well, I would say this novel is evidence of that. In it, disability worked as an echo of the lesson that life accumulates, and our taking responsibility slips and slides in uneven ways over what we are actually responsible for. I like the lesson, but not the reinforcement of the idea that disability is a brute fact about which nobody can do anything. I think there’s lots that can be done, but novels like this serve to reassure us we don’t have to try.
*And let me add, I recognize we can’t lump all disabilities together, and the kind of severe cognitive impairment which Adrian Jr. has is not the exact same thing, either in his experience or in terms of its social construction, as the disabilities of the folks quoted, who are rugby players who have paraplegia.