HT reviewer Arunima Mazumdar picks her favourite read of 2023

A retired man reminisces about his school days and the repercussions of his conduct in this Booker Prize winning novel from over a decade ago

The first time I read Julian Barnes’s The Sense of an Ending was way back in 2016 on a flight from Delhi to Bangalore. By the time I retired to my nondescript hotel room for the night, I had some hundred pages left, and despite an early alarm for the next day, I stayed up till I reached the novel’s intensely devastating end – an end that reverberated in my consciousness for a long time.

The Sense of an Endingwon the Booker Prize in 2011 and became a commercial and literary success, and rightly so, for it crushes you in a way that you like (Amazon)

In September this year, I decided to re-read the book. I vividly remembered the chaos it brought with it the last time, and for some reason was drawn to the possibility of revisiting a familiar disruption from the past. My personal life was a tumultuous wreck and I turned to Barnes’s fiction to help settle my nerves.

The Sense of an Ending is the story of Tony Webster who takes the reader through his past, right from his teenage years at an all-boys London high school, and the time he spent with the strikingly intelligent but aloof Adrian Finn. Also part of the scene is Veronica, Tony’s girlfriend at the time. The book delineates Tony’s juvenile conduct and the repercussions that come to haunt him. The beauty of the novel lies in how Barnes connects the fragmented lives of Tony, Adrian and Veronica, adding moods of regret, guilt, and introspection.

Reviewer Arunima Mazumdar (Courtesy the subject)

The severity of Tony’s actions as a boy catch up with him and the reader walks the rueful path of reality with the protagonist even as he learns to live with his fears and insecurities.

The Sense of an Ending won the Booker Prize in 2011 and became a commercial and literary success, and rightly so, for it crushes you in a way that you like. It brings with it the sweet agony of being defeated, a feeling that yearns to be manifested and yet, forgotten.

Allow Barnes’s prose to consume you, fully and tragically. Embrace the flutter and clutter, the constant urge to seek the truth, and the wishful thinking, and the wondering about what if things hadn’t gone the way they did. For life, when it turns out like literature, is nothing but devastating: a moment of accumulation, responsibility, and great unrest.

Arunima Mazumdar is an independent writer. She is @sermoninstone on Twitter and @sermonsinstone on Instagram.