Review: The Sense of an Ending

The Sense of an Ending by Julian Barnes
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

"...what else have I done wrong?"

There have been many mystics in South Asia (and plausibly around the world) through the ages who have been asking to look inside, find the truth inside. First obstacle we face looking in is the truth itself. For the truth that stares in our faces is often the wrong we own. There is a couplet of Kabir (a mystic from India, contemporary of Guru Nanak) that goes like this:

“I went searching for evil outside, I found none.
I looked inside and I was second to none.”

I have had a fair acquaintance with mysticism, so I couldn’t help seeing parallels here, but you must admit - even if you are an atheist - that the book makes you look back a little, searching and re-arranging memories to make sure you didn’t mix them up because “what you end up remembering isn’t always the same as what you have witnessed.”.

If we were narrators of own stories, we would be as unreliable as Tony Webster even if we weren’t as “chippy, jealous and malign” ever. The unreliability of Tony adds to it the thrill and suspense making you race through its one hundred and fifty odd pages.

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