EPISODE 26; IN WHICH THE STRUGGLING AUTHOR SLAGS OFF HIS BETTERS

Welcome to my blog which will be surprised to see you.

I’ve been reading some of the Booker Short List, three so far. I’m not a generous critic, nor a fair one; that’s what envy does to you.

On Wednesday I read the winning novel, Julian Barnes’s ‘A Sense of Ending’ as my grandson constructed lego Star War figures and occasionally threatened to imprison me. (At one point we had a fulsome discussion about whether the word ‘imprison’ could apply to venues that weren’t prisons or whether using that verb meant that wherever the imprisoning takes place then becomes a prison.) In view of my responsibility at the time and of the interruptions, I am willing to admit I may have missed some essential elements of the story for which I apologize to all concerned. I shall reread it, for it is very short, before publishing this response.

The first two books I read, Snowdrops and Half-Blood Blues, had been about people, places and characters that I have no personal knowledge of or, outside of the novel, any particular interest in. ‘A Sense of Ending’ is a very different proposition for the main character is about my age, has lived in times and places I know and is reflecting on issues I often reflect upon. Because of these things, together with its brevity and its essentially dull plot, this book reads more like a series of meditations and reflections rather than a novel.

All three books are first person narratives by people who have done some wrong that they are now reflecting on. The fact that I didn’t like any of these characters isn’t because of the actions they took but because of the sort of people they seem to be anyway, trudgers who write themselves off and then both glamorize and loathe those that don’t.

Reviewing a book is much harder than I expected. Especially one by an author as well-respected as Julian Barnes. If I’d never heard of him, I’d think this the work of a man who had missed out on life, apart perhaps from one evening by the River Severn. But obviously the character in the story is not the author but someone invented by Julian to express something. What and why, I haven’t worked out.

Rather than review the book as such, it is some of the statements in it and attitudes expressed that I will respond to.

Undoubtedly one theme is how we reconstruct past events, history. ‘History is that certainty produced at the point where the imperfections of memory meet the inadequacies of documentation.’  This statement is made by the adolescent Adrian.

The book is adolescent all the way through because the narrator never grows up. But thinks he does. Maybe that is why I found the book both annoying and provocative. Throughout the book there is the inference that adolescent emotions are more powerful, more consuming, than adult ones. This is not my experience. And I’m saying that despite being a teenager who twice tried to kill himself and, much like Adrian in the book, believed in the application of thought to life and hated the English way of not being serious about being serious. None of this begins to compare to the emotional profundities of child-rearing or, for that matter, of ever nearing towards the end. No wonder this guy was divorced, no wonder he’s still dumb enough to think there’s two kinds of women; he’s emotionally stunted.

Or is that the point?

Maybe it is. I’m quite away of how much of my character was formed by and is still stuck in adolescence. Maybe it is the mirror I don’t like.

The author does generalise. ‘…This may be one of the differences between youth and age: when we are young, we invent different futures for ourselves; when we are old we invent different pasts for others.’

No. On both counts.

Here’s another one. “We thought we were being mature when we were only being safe. We imagined we were being responsible but we were only being cowardly. What we called realism turned out to be a way of avoiding things than facing them.”

Again, not me. Maybe if capitalism continues to wobble, more like this narrator will emerge from the woodwork of employment with their ‘mea culpas’. Too fucking late, mate.

Rereading the book, I see that the narrator admits he’s a boring tosser. At the same time he’s eulogizing his friend for his suicide which wasn’t the intellectual choice that Tony was assuming it to be. This is why he can write rubbish like this:” When you are in your twenties, even if you’re confused and uncertain about your aims and purposes, you have a strong sense of what life itself is, and of what you in life are, and might become.”

Once more, not for me.

“Sometimes I think the purpose of life is to reconcile us to its eventual loss, by proving, however long it takes, that life isn’t all it’s cracked up to be.”  Which is all very well if you’re a privileged middle-class boy who never had to grow-up but for most of the world there isn’t even the luxury of disappointment.

I do recognize the narrator’s experience of memory, of how much we experience ourselves as not being able to recall things, only to be staggered by a sudden memory in which tiny details are remembered. My dreams have shown me that somewhere in my brain everything is recorded. It is frightening actually because I’d hate to find the memories taking over, especially as there is no part of the past I’d like to go back to – for more than a few moments – and none I could bear to be stuck in. There’s a Paul Simon song, Bookends, with the lines

Preserve your memories

They’re all that’s left you.

How dark is that! And darker, perhaps, for this book which shows the unreliability and phantasmorgoric nature of memory. If all you have are your memories and they turn out to be false…then you have nothing.

“You get towards the end of life – no, not life itself, but of something else: the end of any likelihood of change in that life. You are allowed a long moment of pause, time enough to ask the question: what else have I done wrong.”

Okay, it’s a story, the guy can say anything he likes and I don’t have to respond but he does write ‘you’ and often refers to ‘we’ (i.e. other 60s children of a male middle-class persuasion) so…the idea that there is an end to the likelihood of change in that life is delusion, the same comfortable delusion he has always had. Anything can happen at any time and unless he’s very lucky the biggest challenges are still ahead. As for that long moment of pause in which he asks, what else have I done wrong, well, in my experience most people are asking themselves that every day of their lives. (The answer of course is nothing but that’s another thing altogether.)

Does the fact that the book got into my head and make me think mean it was good? No. Would I recommend this book to anyone else? No, because I couldn’t see what good it could do them.

I have now read, and will add, my daughter’s review of the book which unhindered by a) authorial envy b) taking it all personally c) being like me and the narrator, a male middle-class boy brought up in single-sex schools in the 60s, is much fairer, clearer (yep, the narrator is dense; yep, Veronica was normal) and to the point than mine.

Of course you can ignore that remark if you’re a prospective employer reading with a view to snapping up my talent.

If I don’t hear from that publisher soon I’ll be every bit as miserable as this book was.


My Daughter's Review
I loved this book, it reminded me of Brideshead Revisited (Evelen
Waugh) or The Liar (Stephen Fry) in atmosphere. It had a sort of classic school story feel to it (I always loved The Chalet school when I was young). It had a nice peaceful pace. I thought it was brilliantly well written.
I found it a bit predictable; Adrian arrives they all have crushes on him; he goes to Oxford. The first suicide is followed by another suicide (with a certain predictability). The mother’s strange foray made it almost inevitable that somebody was going to sleep with her. I must admit I expected it to be the protagonist.
The predictableness of the suicide was interesting, I’ve been thinking about suicide (generically) most of the people who I know who have committed suicide were linked to other people who committed suicide. I was listening to the Freakonomics podcast on suicide, which talked about copy-cat suicides. It also talked about suicide as a rational action; I found myself trying to do a cost-benefit analysis on Adrian’s suicide. I couldn’t quite work out when he committed suicide, before or after the baby was born?
That there was some relationship with the special needs group was also obvious and I found myself thinking that the protagonist was being extraordinarily dense. I thought the ‘knowingness’ of Margaret was irritating.
In terms of the questions- I didn’t think there was anything wrong with Veronica. When we first meet her she is simply a young girl at college who is enjoying a relationship that is as new or alien to her as to him. They are both just playing at it. She seems to be marginally more confident than him but not extremely so, I thought he projected a lot onto her.
She didn’t seem to go out with Adrian till after they split up and given how dull the main protagonist was it seemed reasonable. It had also been set up- he was the catch, the cool one. She was supposed to want to date him before she met him.
Later she clearly acted oddly, but who wouldn’t? Her mother had stolen her boyfriend (presumably splitting up the family) and got her pregnant before killing himself. Our protagonist then turned up, stalked her and then started going on about it, whilst apparently being really thick.
I thought he was neither hero nor anti-hero but narrator. The drama had all happened elsewhere and he was telling their story. He just seemed to think it was all about him.
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