Julian Barnes' book "The Sense of an Ending" is so much more than the memories of a retired man named Tony Webster who recalls how he and his friends at school vowed to remain friends for life, and who now reflects on the paths he and his friends have taken.
It is a meditation on ageing, memory and regret, and hard to imagine to be made into a movie. I mean, how do you turn into a movie something as beautifully written as "Sometimes I think the purpose of life is to reconcile us to its eventual loss by wearing us down, by proving, however long it takes, that life isn't all it's cracked up to be"? [Page 105]
"We live in time - it holds us and moulds us - but I've never felt I understood it very well. And I'm not referring to theories about how it bends and doubles back, or may exist elsewhere in parallel versions. No, I mean ordinary, everyday time, which clocks and watches assure us passes regularly: tick-tock, click-clock. Is there anything more plausible than a second hand? And yet it takes only the smallest pleasure or pain to teach us time's malleability. Some emotions speed it up, others slow it down; occasionally, it seems to go missing - until the eventual point when it really does go missing, never to return."
And then "... you get towards the end of life - no, not life itself, but of something else: the end of any likelihood of change in that life. You are allowed a long moment of pause, time enough to ask the question: what else have I done wrong?"
"The Sense of an Ending" was also the favourite book of a friend who passed away three years ago this month, and whose slow decline over a couple of years I witnessed - click here. The Sense of an Ending indeed!
