Julian Barnes - The Sense of an Ending

Tony Webster and his gang start out as sex-mad teens not quite experiencing what the swinging sixties was all about. Frustration and adoration, the former reserved for his not quite yielding girlfriend Veronica Ford, the latter for newcomer Adrian Finn. Absorbed into their friendship group, but keeping himself at arms length through his seriousness and nonconformity the rest of the group look up to his vast intelligence. Or this is how they remember it.

Barnes has Tony Webster hurtling through his actions and emotions in the first part of the book, dedicated to his early youth, love and friendships. Sure of his actions and injustices, it is only in the second part of the book that Tony begins to question his reliability as a witness to these events having now reached the later stages of his life. As he begins to question and unpick events from his youth, prompted by an unexpected lawyer's letter, Tony realises that maybe his own history is made up of the 'self-delusions of the defeated'. His own impact on time and events begins to get scrutinised and necessitates corroboration to prove whether the happenings in his otherwise average life happened as he imagined, or whether he was an untrustworthy witness to his own events.

The Sense of an Ending is an interesting investigation of the fallibility of memory and how we bear witness to our lives. A brilliant insight into a portion of someone's world and their changing reflections and accounts of their history it is nothing short of a great and thought-provoking read.