Yes, for the most part, an off-year, but with one glowing exception: The Sense of an Ending won.  It is a wonderful book — short, subtle, thoughtful, not only readable but re-readable.  Let’s move on from the fiasco (for a moment) and focus on the winning title.  It deserves it.

This is a short book (just over 150 pages) in two finely controlled parts.  Our narrator is Anthony Webster (Tony).  He’s in his sixties, he was married once and is still on friendly terms with his ex-wife (she might be only friend), and he’s proud that his daughter has turned out as well as she did, even if they don’t talk as much as he’d like.  Part 1 focuses on a few key relationships and events from forty years ago that have recently arisen to haunt the sixty-year-old narrator, causing the narrator to think thoughts such as these:

Had my life increased, or merely added to itself? [. . . .] There had been addition — and subtraction — in my life, but how much multiplication?  And this gave me a sense of unease, or unrest.

So as Tony is attempting to grappling with his past, he lays these particular memories out before us.  From the beginning Tony is forthright about the fallibility of his mind, how much his memories may be inadequate or self-serving or even false.  After listing a few vestigial images, he says, “This last isn’t something I actually saw, but what you end up remembering isn’t always the same as what you have witnessed.”

The first central memory deals with the time when Tony was in school.  He had two best friends named Colin and Alex, and when Adrian Finn moved in Adrian automatically and inexplicably became the fourth.  They were all smart, but Adrian is clearly ahead of them all, a true philosopher at heart.  For example, once they were together in history class, debating the knowability of history, and Adrian came up with this apt definition: “History is that certainty produced at the point where the imperfections of memory meet the inadequacies of documentation.”  Obviously, Tony has already told us that the nature of memory is central to this story; documentation will spur the action in Part 2.

The second key memory in Part 1 comes after school is done.  The four friends have moved on, and Tony’s attention is spent on his first girlfriend, Veronica.  I’m going to be honest here: I don’t know how to write about Veronica.  In Part 2, Barnes not only shows how Tony’s own memory of events can change, but he also changes the way we see (and feel about) Part 1.  I don’t mean he “recasts” what has already been told, or not only that anyway; I love it when authors do that, but Barnes goes further because the reader is complicit.  I’m just at a loss here regarding Veronica, whom Tony’s ex-wife calls “the Fruitcake” — well, perhaps that says enough about how Tony remembers her.

Tony’s relationship with Adrian and Veronica are central, and they lead to a quiet tragedy that took place forty years ago.  In Part 2, in the present day, Veronica’s mother has died and left Tony a diary.  It’s been forty years since Tony was with Veronica, and the only contact he had with her mother was during the only weekend trip he took to visit Veronica’s family.  Why she is leaving him a diary, he has no idea.  When Tony receives word from the solicitor that Veronica has taken the diary and refuses to let him have it, Tony tries to figure out a way to get it (some documentary corroboration).  He doesn’t realize how much this is going to change who he thinks he is, and it leads him to think quite badly (perhaps quite rightly) of himself:

And so, for the first time, I began to feel a more general remorse — a feeling somewhere between self-pity and self-hatred — about my whole life.  All of it.  I had lost the friends of my youth.  I had lost the love of my wife.  I had abandoned the ambitions I had entertained.  I had wanted life not to bother me too much, and had succeeded — and how pitiful that was.

I love that last sentence.  How well Barnes manages to imbue simple sentences with deep emotions.  It reminds me of when he wrote, “I don’t belive in God, but I miss him.”  These two sentences alone are clear proof that literary writing does not mean “impenetrable,” as the critics say (though it can).  In these, Barnes presents a simple thought, and then undercuts it with another simple phrase, but that undercutting and the resulting combination show a complexity of feeling and thought that many writers could not articulate in a page.

So Tony begins to see the past a bit differently.  Strangely, this doesn’t just mean he remembers things in a new light; rather, he remembers things he’d long forgotten.

For years you survive with the same loops, the same facts and the same emotions.  I press a button marked Adrian or Veronica, the tape runs, the usual stuff spools out.  The events reconfirm the emotions — resentment, a sense of injustice, relief — and vice versa.  There seems no way of accessing anything else; the case is closed.  Which is why you seek corroboration, even if it turns out to be contradiction.  But what if, even at a late stage, your emotions relating to those long-ago events and people change?

Barnes’ two-part novel enacts that very idea: what happens to memory when emotions change?  We learn more about the past as Tony does, and our impressions of what went on in Part 1 change a great deal.  As I said, and I don’t think everyone will have this same experience, but it made me feel strongly for Veronica.  Tony had a memory buried in resentment that came to the surface as the resentment dissipated:

My brain must have erased it from the record, but now I knew it for a fact.  She was there with me.  We sat on a damp blanket on a damp riverside holding hands; she had brought a flask of hot chocolate.

It’s that flask of hot chocolate; it reveals, subtly, that she valued their relationship, tried to nurture it, tried to prepare simple pleasures with her hands.  The book doesn’t stop its revelations there, but I shall.  One thing I promise: Barnes doesn’t go the easy route and help us discover that Tony remembered things all wrong and now this new stuff is the way it was.  Some have complained that the book is too ambiguous.  It doesn’t solve itself; it just reveals complexities and shakes certainty.

Before ending this post, I wanted to also bring up the book’s tone.  Barnes is, in some ways, presenting an essay on memory, but this is also a book about loss, particularly the loss of time.  All of this is leading to death and what the life that just ended meant anyway.

The Sense of an Ending is a fabulous book.  There are layers and layers that I didn’t even touch on here but that I am certain will be with me for some time.  Highly recommended.

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This is a three-part story.  The first section is called “The Novelist in the Countryside.”  The story begins in the early 1980s.  An unnamed British writer — at this point a young writer with only one book to his name (but it did win a prize, after which his first wife left him) — is overseeing a type of writing retreat in Wales.  Though he certainly wants to help with the chores, which are typically the students’ responsibility, and though he wants the students to find their own way, he is nevertheless confident in his abilities and feels he has wisdom to pass on to them.

The students bicker about writing, and one of the conclusions he draws is “Don’t try putting your own life into fiction.  It won’t work.”  Attempting to get this point across, he tells the story of a man he saw in Greece.  The man had a beard and the machismo of Hemingway.  The author, without much more to go on, assumed the man must have been attempting to mimic Hemingway, as some do.

He left it at that, hoping that his students would reflect on the assumptions we automatically make about people [. . .].  He also hoped that they would reflect back on life’s influence on art, and then art’s influence back on life.  And, if they had asked, he would have replied that, for him, Hemingway, as a novelist, was like an athlete bulked up on steroids.

The next section, “The Professor in the Alps,” takes place a few years later.  The writer, with more books under his belt, is more famous and has been asked to participate in a six-day writing course in the Alps.  If he was confident as a writer before, he’s now full of swagger.  He knows he doesn’t have that much to offer, but he’s become good at the public performance.  Here he is speaking about what he’s learned about writing from Sibelius the composer:

“Seven symphonies, one violin concerto, orchestral tone poems, songs, a string quartet called ‘Voces Intimae’ — ‘Intimate Voices.’  Let’s take the symphonies.”  Not least because he had nothing to say about the other works.  “They start — the first two — with great melodic expansiveness.  You hear a lot of Tchaikovsky, a bit of Bruckner, Dvorák, perhaps, anyway, the great nineteenth-century European symphonic tradition.  Then the Third — shorter, just as melodic, and yet more restrained, held back, moving in a new direction.  Then the great Fourth, austere, forbidding, granitic, the work where he most engages with modernism.”  He’d stolen that phrase from an Austrian pianist who said in a radio interview, “No, Sibelius is not of much interest to me, except for the Fourth, where he engages with modernism.”

The author knows it’s a performance and eventually turns on part of one of Sibelius’s symphony, a good ten minute portion.  He loves that he gets paid for this.

That comes off a bit harsh, though, as if the author were exploiting the system.  In truth, the author is also a bit relieved to just listen to Sibelius.  Later, when some of the students told him they enjoyed the music:

In another mood, he might have taken this amiss, and presumed they were saying they didn’t like something else — his way of teaching, his clothes, his opinions, his books, his life — but the music had delivered, if not a peacefulness, at least a quiet pause into his being.

His life, after all, is a bit of a mess.  Beneath the performance, the man is vulnerable and a bit of a wreck.  Where he once didn’t think much of Hemingway, he is starting to see more in the fiction that relates to his own life.

For completion sake, but without spoilers, the third part is called “The Maestro in the Midwest.”  A bit later in life, the author is now teaching in the American Midwest, and he’s a considerably different presence.  Hemingway is still there, perhaps more than ever.  He sees that sometimes in the myth of the writer, the writer is also trapped.

In the end, I enjoyed this story, as I often do enjoy stories by Julian Barnes.  But I’m afraid that “Homage to Hemingway” was a bit unsatisfying.  I believe this is, in part if not in whole, because this story followed what I thought to be an excellent Alice Munro story where so much remained under the surface.  Here, in contrast, so much of the material is fairly explicit, as well done as it is.  Whatever the case, even though I found quite a bit of interesting character development and enjoyed watching the author change and contradict himself over time, I don’t believe ”Homage to Hemingway” will remain long in my memory.

In its own way, this novel is also a bit of nonfiction.  The Arthur in the title is the famous Sir Arthur Conan Doyle.  A bit more obscure, but no less real, George Edalji is the son of an Indian father and a Scotish mother.  The novel’s main narrative thrust comes when George, due partially on his race, is arrested for a series of animal mutilations.  Knowing he was innocent, Arthur engages on a quest to prove his innocence and find the real culprit.  This actually happened, as unbelievable as it may sound: Arthur was confident enough in his sleuthing to adopt the trade of his greatest legacy, Sherlock Holmes.  However, the book is so much more than an interesting telling of this biographical footnote. 

The book begins with some wonderful, though completely disconnected (Arthur and George didn’t meet until 1903, much later in their lives) vignettes about Arthur and George’s youths.  Here are the first lines in the novel, introducing Arthur:

A child wants to see.  It always begins like this, and it began like this then.  A child wanted to see.

He was able to walk, and could reach up to a door handle.  He did this with nothing that could be called purpose, merely the instinctive tourism of infancy.  A door was there to be pushed; he walked in, stopped, looked.  There was nobody to observe him; he turned and walked away, carefully shutting the door behind him.

What he saw there became his first memory.  A small boy, a room, a bed, closed curtains leaking afternoon light.  By the time he came to describe it publicly, sixty years had passed.  How many internal retellings had smoothed and adjusted the plain words he finally used?  Doubtless it still seemed as clear as on the day itself.  The door, the room, the light, the bed, and what was on the bed: a “white, waxen thing.”

A small boy and a corpse: such encounters would not have been so rare in the Edinburgh of his time.

And here are the first lines introducing George:

George does not have a first memory, and by the time anyone suggests that it might be normal to have one, it’s too late.  He has no recollection obviously preceding all others – not of being picked up, cuddled, laughed at or chastised.  He has an awareness of once having been an only child, and a knowledge that there is now Horace as well, but no primal sense of being disturbingly presented with a brother, no expulsion from paradise.  Neither a first sight, nor a first smell, whether of a scented mother or a carbolicy maid-of-all-work.

Though I often don’t like it when an author fiddles with verb tenses, in this book it becomes more than a gimmick.  Arthur’s narrative is in the past tense until he meets Miss Jean Leckie, a woman who will become his notorious mistress in a notoriously unconsumated affair.  Indeed, one of the most interesting aspects of the novel delves into Arthur’s inner battle to be faithful to his dying wife, whom he loved dearly, and maintain an unsexual romantic affair with Miss Leckie.  George’s narrative is completely in the present tense until he is put in prison for the animal mutilations.  If that were the whole point though, then I would say this was a clever narrative gimmick, but Barnes extends this “tense” issue beyond this.  Much of the book deals with life and death, what comes after, what remains.  It is not a spoiler to dislcose the last lines: “What does he see?  What did he see?  What will he see?” 

Without disclosing too much of the story, it must be said that Barnes uses Arthur and George to examine in novel form what he eventually does in his memoir, and had previously done in a New Yorker personal history essay entitled “The Past Conditional,” which begins, “I don’t believe in God, but I miss Him.”  Using Arthur’s fascination with spiritism, Barnes delves into the more spectral aspects of our existence.  When most authors would have been content to exploit Doyle’s attempt to do Holmes in a simple mystery novel, Barnes uses it to roam around some longer-lasting mysteries.