The Sense Of An Ending - Julian Barnes

Boy meets girl, girl leaves boy, runs off with his best friend, close group of male friends is broken up as a result - Julian Barnes's Booker-winning novella appears to lean heavily on the John Terry / Wayne Bridge saga. There's also a close resemblance to Ian McEwan's On Chesil Beach, and the protagonist displays a hint of Martin Amis's middle age ennui, but it's the spectre of Terry which looms largest over this year's prize-winner.

There were a number of stand-out books up for consideration by this year's panel, among them the excellently readable Half-Blood Blues and Ali Smith's There But For The. So why on earth did they pick this slim effort, with its lame dialogue, in which sixth formers hold forth like history professors? The opening of the book, in particular, is ripe for a Craig Brown parody: 'Tick tock, is there anything more plausible than a second hand?'

The narrative voice is fashionably dull, making 'The Sense of an Ending' the literary equivalent of being trapped by the pub bore: 'That's life, isn't it?', we are asked, over and over. 'That's what people do, don't they?' When Barnes isn't being boring, he is boorish. His protagonist, Tony, 'wanked explosively', and 'peed aggressively'. I yawned, expansively. Yes, Barnes does a great job of getting inside the skin of his character; but when the character is this dull, should he have bothered?

Likewise, Barnes fails to provoke interest when he tries his hand at plot twists. Like a hillock in a Norfolk landscape, or the curve on a rural Motorway, there is the occasional event to keep the reader awake, but they struggle to create real dramatic involvement. Late on, Barnes commits the fundamental sin of withholding vital information, before springing a surprise ending on the reader, a thoroughly dishonest piece of trickery, requiring no skill or subtlety on the part of the author.

Presumably, the revelation about Tony’s weekend with the in-laws was supposed to be a dramatic literary device, but instead you get the impression of an author who has run out of ideas and doesn’t know how to finish his book. Dress this up in ‘the mutability of memory’ all you like, but the sudden appearance of un-hinted at information has no more credibility than you would expect to find in the works of Dan Brown.

At one point, a young character speculates: 'What is the point of having a situation worthy of fiction if the protagonist doesn't behave as he would have done in a book?'. It may be that Julian Barnes is having a massive, postmodern joke at the expense of the reader, and this is the key to it. But, the reader is entitled to ask, what is the point of having a book, if the protagonist doesn't behave in a way that's worth reading?