Finished reading Julian Barnes' latest novel, The Sense of an Ending, the day after it won the Man Booker award. It is an excellent short novel even if its construction is a bit obvious, sort of like those new ecto skeletal buildings ... you see everything blatantly that holds it together, but still marvel.
Barnes' protagonist, Tony Webster, is a man who decides how to construct his own life, making it comfortable and avoiding conflicts. He is not a person typically lost in the past nor analyzing how he came to be where he is -- divorced, retired, pretty much out of contact with friends from the past. When that past intrudes, it comes back almost with footnotes. Webster filters out his memories of school lessons, outings and events so that they inform and reinforce his perceived character. It is a lesson in filtering past experiences, assigning import, and force fitting patterns, a worthy uber theme of novel writing itself. What does the author purposefully include to advance the plot, provide a subtheme and develop characters and relationships? Barnes asks the reader to think how are these intentions different from how a person writes his own internal autobiography.
An interesting book and marvelously written. I have already reserved a couple other of his novels to appreciate his complete oeuvre, novels that contributed to the Man Booker this time around after four previous nominations.
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