Julian Barnes

I can't say what exactly attracted me to Julian Barnes's Sense of an Ending: after all, it was the start of a new year. But there I was, face to face with this recent winner of the Booker Prize. 

And I'll admit, I'm a bit confused by it all: because while there were pieces of the novel that moved me, the book as a whole did not. Why all the praise? 

Barnes has lots to say about memory and forgetting, and about the nature of the past. But he never takes these meditations beyond what I might consider the surface: there's nothing here that came close, for instance, to the poignancy of Graham Swift's Waterland. 

Perhaps this was a result of the Barnes's approach: his novel is slight, his sentences ephemeral. This is not at all like Flaubert's Parrot, which I remember really enjoying. No, this is one of those modern novels that's just a bit too delicate. Each sentence is a thing of beauty, but the result is a thing that simply hangs there, without fully diving in. 

All of which is not to say that Ending is a failure: I maintain Barnes has assembled the start of something interesting, and that the story he weaves is -- or could be -- compelling. But it needs to be longer; it needs to expand beyond the few key memories which propel its characters. 

I understand what Barnes is proposing when he talks about the ability of memories to reemerge or to generate their own reality. But to really prove these points -- to show just how malleable our memories can be -- Barnes would have done well to present a greater number of them. The Sense of an Ending shows memory in isolation: what comes next is memory over time -- memory interacting with, and influenced by, other subtle forms of human expression.