Julian Barnes and the Emotions of Englishmen

By LIESL SCHILLINGER

Published: November 10, 2011

Many literary careers have been made, and doubtless more will be, by conveying the inwardness, awkwardness and social anxiety that constrict British mores like a very tightly wrapped cummerbund. This suffocating self-consciousness lies at the heart of British humor, whether in the farcical scramble of trying to keep up appearances or the risible but sincere terror of being mocked — which sniping English schoolboys still fear, even when they’re grown up, bald and 70.

It takes a brave author to mine this dynamic for pathos instead of sniggers. Evelyn Waugh did it in “Brideshead Revisited,” as did Philip Larkin in “Jill.” (Think of the scholarship boy John Kemp, who “tingled and shuddered” with embarrassment when his posh Oxford roommate’s friend caught him looking at her with desire.) And Kazuo Ishiguro did it in “The Remains of the Day,” which won the Man Booker Prize in 1989. Now, with his powerfully compact new novel, “The Sense of an Ending” — which has just won the 2011 Booker Prize — Julian Barnes takes his place among the subtly assertive practitioners of this quiet art.

Barnes, it goes without saying, is a much-decorated veteran of English literature’s emotional battlefields, one who has covered this terrain many times before. But in “The Sense of an Ending” — his 14th work of fiction — he engages with the untidy collisions of the human struggle more directly than ever, even as he remains characteristically light on his feet. In many of his earlier novels, Barnes tackled sexual jealousy, insecurity and competition in an almost jaunty manner. When a husband in “Before She Met Me” guzzles wine and weeps, tormented by thoughts of his wife’s past lovers, a friend dryly remarks, “Doesn’t sound much fun.” In “Talking It Over” and “Love, Etc.,” in which two men take turns marrying the same woman, all three members of the ménage are too sophisticated to show much pique. And in more elaborately scaffolded novels like “Flaubert’s Parrot” and “Arthur and George,” Barnes encases any sharp-edged questions of love in the sheathing of plots about historical figures. But in “The Sense of an Ending,” he has dispensed with detachment and shed his armor plating.

The new book is a mystery of memory and missed opportunity. Tony Webster, a cautious, divorced man in his 60s who “had wanted life not to bother me too much, and had succeeded,” receives an unexpected bequest from a woman he’d met only once, 40 years earlier. The mother of his college girlfriend, Veronica, has bequeathed him £500 — a legacy that unsettles Tony, pushing him to get in touch with Veronica (their relationship had ended badly) and seek answers to certain unresolved questions.

Had he loved Veronica? (At the time, it was an emotion he had lacked the spine to own up to.) What had happened to the energetic boy he used to be, “book-hungry, sex-hungry, meritocratic, anarchistic,” who thought of himself as “being kept in some kind of holding pen, waiting to be released” into an engaged adult life of “passion and danger, ecstasy and despair”? And whatever became of the friend he and Veronica both knew back then, a brainy, idealistic boy named Adrian Finn? Gradually, Tony assembles his willfully forgotten past impressions and actions, joining together the links that connect him to these people, as if trying to form a “chain of individual responsibilities” that might explain how it happened that his life’s modest wages had resulted in “the accumulation, the multiplication, of loss.”

Adrian had impressed Tony when he announced his exasperation with their country’s national pose of perpetual insouciance. “I hate the way the English have of not being serious about being serious, I really hate it,” Adrian declared. Hearing this, Tony had felt a “throb of vindication.” But his vindication was unfounded; it belied his own noncommittal nature.

Adrian’s indifference to playing it cool somehow made him the leader of the boys’ clique when they were teenagers; he became the one they looked up to. Yet Tony never emulated Adrian, and was guilty of the pose Adrian deplored: pretending not to care. He pays for this failure again and again, from his 20s to his 60s. “Does character develop over time?” Tony asks himself, wondering at the “larger holding pen” that has come to contain his adult life. Maybe character freezes sometime between the ages of 20 and 30, he speculates. “And after that, we’re just stuck with what we’ve got. We’re on our own. If so, that would explain a lot of lives, wouldn’t it? And also — if this isn’t too grand a word — our tragedy.”

Tony’s tragedy, “if this isn’t too grand a word,” is that he avoids deep connection rather than embracing it, for fear of risking its loss. In college he did not consummate his relationship with Veronica, telling himself that abstinence spared him burdensome conversations about “where the relationship was heading.” He pretends that this was his choice: “Something in me was attracted to women who said no.” But 40 years later, her mother’s gift reawakens Tony’s memories of steamy “infra-sex” with Veronica — sensual fumblings that took place while they were mostly clothed. “Part of me hadn’t minded not ‘going the whole way,’ ” he decides. It had protected him from “an overwhelming closeness I couldn’t handle.”

Not long after the breakup with Veronica, Tony had met, married and (eventually) been divorced from a nonenigmatic woman with “clear edges,” someone he knew he wouldn’t mind losing terribly much. In Margaret, he sought a mature, “peaceable” life. Decades later, he sees the fraudulence in that discretion. “We thought we were being mature when we were only being safe. We imagined we were being responsible but were only being cowardly. What we called realism turned out to be a way of avoiding things rather than facing them.”

But who does Tony enfold into his “we”? His agonized analysis is entirely self-referential, as solitary and armored as the man himself. Decades earlier, Tony had accused Veronica of an “inability to imagine anyone else’s feelings or emotional life,” but it was he, not she, who was incapable of looking outside his own head. Barnes’s unreliable narrator is a mystery to himself, which makes the novel one unbroken, sizzling, satisfying fuse. Its puzzle of past causes is decoded by a man who is himself a puzzle. Tony resembles the people he fears, “whose main concern is to avoid further damage to themselves, at whatever cost,” and who wound others with a hypersensitivity that is insensitive to anything but their own needs. “I have an instinct for survival, for self-preservation,” he reflects. “Perhaps this is what Veronica called cowardice and I called being peaceable.”

“The Sense of an Ending” is a short book, but not a slight one. In it Julian Barnes reveals crystalline truths that have taken a lifetime to harden. He has honed their edges, and polished them to a high gleam.