Tony Webster doesn’t get it, and he never will. That, at any rate, is the opinion of Veronica Ford, his one-time college sweetheart. It is an opinion that Tony, late in life, has come to share. But unbeknownst to Tony, and possibly to Veronica, there is no culpability associated with not getting it. And in some sense, here, ignorance is bliss.
Julian Barnes’ short novel has the feel of an extended short story. The opening section presents the nostalgic story that Tony likes to tell of his life, expansive in recounting his school friends and their various approaches to the driving forces of Eros and Thanatos (love and death), and the moral implications of action and intention; rather more compressed as the story moves into later life. Mingled with the early motifs and ceaselessly reiterated is the distinction between characters and events (i.e. story) on the one hand and the narratives we construct to convey same. Of the many formulations of history provided in the text, perhaps one left unstated might be “the narrative we construct of our past”. In the second, longer, part of the novel, Tony’s narrative of his past life undergoes severe and frequent transformation. As new facts come to light, whether as documentation or retrieved memories, Tony is forced to adjust his conception of himself and his friends, most especially Veronica, but also Adrian. Tony is constantly deciding what people and events are parts of his story, his narrative. And the sense of an ending, if there is one, is simply where the narrative stops being revised.
So much is compressed into this short novel that you may, like me, have longed for Julian Barnes to have been a bit more expansive. Tony is the only character revealed at length and he is, seemingly, an unreliable witness. But his very unreliableness is unreliable. For he is as reliable as his sources, never wilfully deceptive. One feels he would certainly “get it” if only some of the other characters were a bit more forthcoming. Like me, you may find the juvenile moral calculus employed by Adrian to be both implausible and impracticable. Moreover, muddling Camus and the analytical consequentialists is, I fear, just muddling. Nevertheless there is plenty here worthy of reflection. And certainly Barnes’ prose rarely puts a word wrong. One just rather wishes there were more of it. Recommended.