Geoff Dyer: The shrinking English novel

The narrator of Julian Barnes’s acclaimed novel The Sense of an Ending is told by Veronica, a girlfriend from his university days, that he just doesn’t get it. Then, after more clues have come his way, she tells him that he still doesn’t get it. There are so many things he doesn’t get that he even considers using the line as his epitaph: “Tony Webster — He Never Got It.”

My feelings exactly. I didn’t get the book when I first read it. I still didn’t get it when I reread it after Barnes won this year’s Man Booker Prize, and Stella Rimington, chairwoman of the judging panel (and former head of MI5), said there was more to get each time you read it. To me, there seemed less to get second time around. If such a thing is possible, I didn’t get it even more than I hadn’t got it first time around. However, to pick up on one of the book’s themes, the accumulation of not getting things can add up to a kind of understanding.

The Sense of an Ending is a very short novel in which Tony keeps circling back to memories of Veronica, particularly to a mildly anxious weekend he endured at her parents’ house. That weekend begins to makes sense only in light of what comes after — which in turn has to be seen in the context of what came before, when Tony and two friends were at school. The paucity of action gives Tony ample opportunity to reflect on – and enact – the self-serving and self-deceiving workings of memory. “Again, I must stress that this is my reading now of what happened then. Or rather, my memory now of my reading then of what was happening at the time,” Tony declares in one of several reiterations of the book’s central ideas.

These ideas might better be termed commonplaces. But while commonplaces tend to dress themselves up in their Sunday best to assume greater weight, Barnes has always treated them lightly so that, by a kind of negation of the negation, they are taken ... seriously! (Note Barnes’s pre-emptive body swerve: announced early on, one of Adrian’s pet aversions is “the way the English have of not being serious about being serious”.) Something similar operates at the level of feeling. The author’s famous restraint and withholding take on the form – and are evidence – of a powerful emotion that is being held in. How do we detect this submerged pressure of emotion? By the fact that it has been so thoroughly restrained as to appear nonexistent. Absence is proof of presence.

Tony’s less startling observations often take the form of rhetorical questions posed by “a pedantic, unignorable bore” who does not like “mess” and, as he puts it in one of his endless perambulations round the point, can “only be straightforward”. Not that he is a pathologically unreliable narrator. He is a reliably unreliable narrator, a representative of the national average. Ever since he left school, Tony reliably informs us, he has been “average”: “Average at university and work; average in friendship, loyalty, love; average, no doubt, at sex. There was a survey of British motorists a few years ago which showed that 95 per cent of those polled thought they were ‘better than average’ drivers. But by the law of averages, we’re most of us bound to be average.”

Now, the delineation of ordinariness is not a peculiarly English preoccupation. The narrator of Richard Ford’s Frank Bascombe trilogy leads “the normal applauseless life of us all”, and tells us about it in a “no-frills voice that hopes to uncover simple truth by a straight-on application of the facts”. In Ford’s hands, this becomes an ambitious undertaking that has the sprawling amplitude of a prose continent at its disposal. Across the Atlantic, meanwhile, Barnes’s infolded scrupulousness seems every bit as well adapted to a reduced idea of English fiction. The English Ford – Ford Madox Ford – prepared the narrative formula in The Good Soldier (“Is all this digression or isn’t it digression?”) in 1915; instead of being patented, however, it was, so to speak, nationalised. A recomposition of the passively active ingredients can be found in Kazuo Ishiguro’s narratives of wanly undermined self-evasion, most notably The Remains of the Day. The efficacy of the mixture is tried and tested even if the precise sources remain obscure – but if they are recognised then so much the better. Thus Barnes’s title gives averagely well-informed readers a preparatory pat on the back as they recognise that it has been lifted from a well-known book of criticism by Hugh Kenner.

This was not one of those years when the Man Booker Prize winner was laughably bad. No, any extreme expression of opinion about The Sense of an Ending feels inappropriate. It isn’t terrible, it is just so ... average.

©2011 The New York Times News Service