The Sense of an Ending

Julian Barnes, The Sense of an Ending (Jonathan Cape)

Tony Webster, the character through which Julian Barnes tells this story isn't really to blame and he's not really the 'unreliable narrator' of so much contemporary fiction either. Something that he has forgotten he ever said comes to be horribly prophetic and we share in his awkward state of not knowing until he finds out how the past has unravelled behind him.

Whereas in Ian McEwan's On Chesil Beach the discomfiture comes early and gradually recedes into a wide angle ending in which the difficulties have diminished with time, in The Sense of an Ending it has been kept out of our sight until the gaucheness of the climax.

It is an elegant composition, compact but beautifully expressed. It gives the effect of being much longer than its novella length. It might seem a little unfair on Alan Hollinghurst whose equally well-written novel this year was spread over 500 pages and was dropped from the Booker Prize running at the longlist stage while Barnes is now red hot at 6/4 favourite but that's the way it goes. Perhaps Giles Coren, writing in The Times, will prove top Booker tipster again this year and be glad to be proved wrong that Barnes isn't too good to win it.

That his first girlfriend, Veronica, might not be the 'fruitcake' he took her for might not be Webster's fault but his experience as her ingenue suitor is profoundly observed with its assumptions, naivetes and ironic little episodes. After their relationship ends,

The next day, I took a milk jug she'd given me down to the Oxfam Shop. I hoped she'd see it in the window. But when I stopped to check, there was something else on show instead: a small coloured lithograph of Chislehurst I'd given her for Christmas.

Alongside the even shorter stories of Pulse earlier this year, Barnes provides evidence enough here to suggest he's at the top of his game and among the league leaders of current British fiction. This is a consummately well-made book that only needs to be longer in order to prolong the enjoyment of it.