The Sense Of An Ending by Julian Barnes
Jonathan Cape $34.99
In 1967 the great critic Frank Kermode published The Sense Of An Ending, a series of lectures that not only mined the apocalyptic theme in art, but reviewed the ways in which fiction carves order and pattern out of the chaotic flux of time.
The title of Julian Barnes' quietly mesmerising new novel, which has been shortlisted for this year's Man Booker Prize for Fiction, not only serves as a veiled homage from one masterly reader of fiction to another, but as a period allusion. Kermode's is just the sort of book - and thesis - that his show-off gang of chums ("of course we were pretentious - what else is youth for?") would have swapped during their close-knit student years.
Tony Webster, a retired cultural bureaucrat with an amiably divorced ex-wife and a distantly affectionate daughter, now looks back on the turning-points and forking paths of youth - first in comfort, then with a distress bordering on panic as the time of his life unravels. He recalls a quartet of pals, suburban 60s kids at a hothouse London school, destined to do better than their parents and so satisfy "the genteel social Darwinism of the English middle classes".
Yet, just as in Barnes' 1980 début novel Metroland, that group soon resolves into a contrasting pair.
