Paul Bryant's Reviews > The Sense of an Ending

Such was the big fat craptastic big-reveal groanworthy lurid pulpy Victorian melodramatic you-got-to-be-kidding ending-with-no-sense that the two stars this novel was hanging on to by its fingernails up to page 130 slipped out of its grasp and it ended up with the ignominious one star, but since that puts it in the same company as many much-loved novels it may well be worn as a Badge Of Honour – I envisage one of those peelable stickers on all future editions A P BRYANT ONE STAR NOVEL!! and Julian Barnes can swank around with Zadie Smith, Richard Ford and Don DeLillo and read each other their own one star reviews.

It’s one thing to realise that as a person with a fiction addiction you must tread a lonely path because in Real Life as you may know not that many people are as hopelessly addicted as we here on Goodreads. But then it’s another thing to have to admit that within that already small (but intense, intense) community of readers you are now part of a minority since the majority appear to be besotted with YA/adult romance/fantasy etc. So, mainstream literature is now a minority sport like lacrosse or curling, and should be rebranded. But then, even stranger, to find oneself as the minority of the minority of the minority…. Which happens when the majority of the minority are all raving about a novel that turns out to be The Sense of an Ending.

In Flaubert’s Parrot by JB a guy moons around in France on his own and has thoughts about his life and about Flaubert and you gradually realise that he’s suppressing some horrible thing he doesn’t want to think about. The atmosphere in that novel is transfixing, it’s maximum understated comedy horror. Top novel. This one, 150 pages of picking over an old friendship and a first romance the banal entanglements of which come to a vague watery light when the deceased mother of the ancient girlfriend (it was all 40 years ago) bequeaths to our boring narrator a diary. Like a bolt from the blue.

This was a novel where all the detail of the guy’s current mildly depressed defeated mouldering away English life were exactly and toe-curlingly right, and all the actual incidents in the plot (of which there are five, I think, maybe five and a half) are completely wrong, simply ridiculous – no one would do that. The girlfriend would not (redacted), the mother would totally not (redacted) and if the friend really did (redacted) then the narrator (redacted). This is why a novel can be both intelligent (he drops in a sprinkling of Readers Digest Improve Your Conversation by Quoting Philosophy snippets and he’s forever going on about Time, what is Time, can we control Time or does Time control Us, can Time go backwards or sidewards, can Time flow up one nostril and down the Other?) and also stupid (people don’t behave like this).

This was a Booker prize winner but it was one of the Bad Bookers like Vernon God Little. There are Good Bookers, like Wolf Hall and The White Tiger. Read the good Bookers, avoid the Bad. Keep on the sunny side of life.