The End of “The Sense of an Ending”
You can’t read this book without wanting to talk about the end. I was online looking at discussions and reviews in the middle of the night to make sure I’d worked it out just right.
Some may say that with his spare last few pages, Barnes does the reader no favors. After all, he never spells out in exact terms precisely what it all means. But it’s all there.
We have the revelation from the care worker that Adrian is Veronica’s brother. The knowledge that Sarah, Veronica’s mother, is also Adrian’s mother. We have his name, Adrian. The conclusion that young Adrian is the child of Sarah and older Adrian is unmistakable.
This was one of the times I wished I had a real copy of the book to flip through. But it didn’t take me long to locate a few important passages from the e-book.
Adrian’s strange formulas now suddenly make sense. b = s - vx + a1 or a2 + v + a1 x s = b. The first formula doesn’t involve Tony, and seems to imply little more than Sarah and Adrian together in Veronica’s absence. The second does bring Tony into the equation, which is certainly the more important of the two.
I’ve read people claim that Tony bears little to no responsibility for this outcome, but it’s clear that Adrian disagrees. Apparently the letter Tony sent that encourages Adrian to seek out Sarah must have struck some kind of chord.
It can also be difficult to reconcile Veronica’s behavior throughout the second half of the book. But I found her the character who suddenly made the most sense upon finishing. Veronica, who seems to Tony to be a manipulator, turns out to be if not victimized, then certainly betrayed by nearly everyone else.
Tony’s letter is horrific. I can’t imagine ever receiving such a thing from someone. No matter how you interpret Tony and Veronica’s breakup, the letter is beyond unjustified. It certainly hurt her.
Adrian’s eventual friendship with Sarah and the outcome of it are definitely betrayal of the highest order from a boyfriend. Surely sleeping with someone’s mother is even worse than sleeping with someone’s sister or friend.
Veronica’s strange relationship with her family that Tony notices remains something of a mystery. But she is betrayed terribly by her mother through Sarah’s relationship with Adrian.
And from all these betrayals comes the younger Adrian and older Adrian’s suicide. How does one move on from such a thing? Veronica is the most mistreated of all of them. It’s completely unknown how she and her mother interacted, but she’s clearly been involved in her brother’s life, which can’t be easy given the proximity to her mother. Her father dies soon after. She’s become alienated from her brother Jack. We don’t know what Veronica does for all the ensuing years, but I can’t imagine the hurt she feels. Especially if she has access to Adrian’s diary, which seems to implicate Tony for his role.
Just as Tony casts Veronica in a particular role, surely Veronica has cast Tony in light of all that happened. Their bad breakup, his venomous letter, Adrian’s death and the life she was left with. It would be quite easy to see Tony as a villain who carelessly set about this chain of events in a variety of ways. Clearly it’s a complicated view, which is probably why she insists Tony will never understand it.
I do wonder a little about what she means when she refers to “blood money.” There only interpretation I can see that makes sense is that Sarah pays Tony to compensate him for the loss of Adrian. (This definition of blood money is payment by the murderer to the victim’s kin.) There is so little to tell us about Sarah and Adrian’s relationship, but clearly there was more to it than sex. She says Adrian spoke highly of Tony. She says Adrian’s last months were happy (can this possibly be true or is this Sarah’s own version of events?). Perhaps she sees this payment as a way to wipe away her guilt and Tony as the only party remaining she can plausibly make it to. After all, how could she ever make it up to Veronica?
Mulling over all this, having to look back at Tony, Adrian, Veronica and Sarah and reevaluate them is Barnes’ whole point. Not just for Tony himself but for the reader. I found that my experience considering the novel after its abrupt ending was as fascinating as reading the book itself.
There are so many mysteries remaining. Why did Adrian kill himself? What was his relationship with Sarah? What has happened to Veronica for all these years that she seems so stuck in bitterness? How do the others view Tony? Going over them in light of our new, but still limited, evidence is fun. At least for me.
This book has been compared to On Chesil Beach and it’s a fair comparison. Similar themes. But note how Barnes is different. McEwan takes all the events, lays them out completely, shows you every angle, puts it right in your face. Barnes limits our perceptions, only gradually reveals information, and never fully explains anything. While both authors are interested in similar issues, they present it in such different ways. Still, they’d make a great pairing, wouldn’t they?
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29 Responses to The End of “The Sense of an Ending”
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My Life’s a Mess and That’s Okay
Jess is a procrastinator, a former working mom who is suddenly staying at home, a Dr-Dr's wife, a non-practicing lawyer, an Autism Mom, a devoted reader, a penny pincher, a coupon clipper, a new New England-er, a low-key agnostic, a nice girl, a top-notch speller, a hardcore blogger and a Twitter fiend.
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[...] The End of “The Sense of an Ending” [...]
Very nicely done. I had the same questions and even went as far as asking myself (at one point) whether Tony’s selective memory extended to his having slept with Sarah that day she made the eggs for him, and to his having forgotten about that as well. Anyway, I’m mulling it over from all angles, asking the same questions the book asks about history, memory. And I’m going to go buy more Julian Barnes. Just wanted to compliment you on the fine summary here.
Julie, I had the same question about Tony and Sarah! I haven’t read a lot of other Julian Barnes, but I did really enjoy Arthur & George.
I was searching for an explanation for ‘blood money’ and I think you are right.
I quite liked the book overall. The ending was totally unexpected for me but I wont say it impressed me very much.
Great summary. It strikes me, having read quite a few reviews and commentary, than none have mentioned what I think is the basic clue and most haunting part of the novel, i.e. when Sarah makes her enigmatic wave to Tony at waist level as he leaves after that fateful weekend at the Fords.It’s even mentioned again further along in the novel. Part of Tony’s slective memory seems to imply that he forgets that Veronica, like Margaret, is really “clear-edged” and that Sarah is the enigmatic one all along. Oh, and don’t forget the image of the broken egg foreshadowing a broken offspring, Adrian the younger.
Good point. I hadn’t re-read that point when I was flipping back through the novel. Thanks!
The only problem I have of your position on blood money is that she could have got little of the satisfaction of forgiveness from giving the money to Tony if she didn’t give it until after she died. And I was wondering if you know why you accidentally call Adrian Veronica’s sister? Your thoughts on Veronica’s pain are poignant.
I agree that the timing of the will is odd. But since Sarah is by far the biggest mystery of the book, I’m hesitant to try to make much sense of her actions.
And whoops! Total typo on the sister. Thanks for pointing that out.
it sure seems to me like Sarah probably had sex with Tony as well when he was on the visit. is this one of the final things that comes back to him after his Proustian butter cookie? it also explains why Veronica finally had sex with him, to reclaim something else her mother had stolen after she found out somehow.
re: the sarah mystery and ‘blood money’ : could it not be that because of tony’s horrible letter – adrian went to chiselhurst – seeking the ‘past damage’ – and was seduced by sarah? he would have been confused and upset by his friend tony’s disturbing letter – and perhaps vulnerable. maybe this sort of behaviour had happened in the past with sarah and veronica’s boyfriends? maybe the ‘blood money’ from sarah was guilt? sarah trying to assuage the guilt that she thought tony would be feeling when he one day read the diary and learned how devastating the letter had been? (the letter being the catalyst for adrian’s visit/seduction?
i gotta say – i find the idea that tony slept with sarah whilst the others were out for a walk is a bit unbelievable. not something that tony would have forgotten to mention – especially in his sex starved state!
It’s a plausible interpretation, and really well laid out. However, one niggling detail holds back my support for your interpretation of this supremely compelling novel. You leave Tony on the sidelines, as he does, focussing instead on Adrian and Veronica (as Tony would, in fact, want). His hands are clean, and his conscience scrubbed of all responsibility until very late in the book, and then a remarkable snippet of augmented information comes forth regarding the dark night at Minsterworth and the Severn Bore. There is a damp blanket and the two of them (Tony and Veronica) are holding hands on it while the others have ‘whooped off after it [the wave from the Bore]‘. Tony and Veronica have not been as still or focussed about themselves as a couple than here. On the last pages of the novel Barnes writes: ‘And I thought of a cresting wave of water, lit by a moon, rushing past and vanishing upstream, pursued by a band of yelping students whose torchbeams criss-crossed in the dark.’ But it is a scene without Tony and Veronica in it. Why do we not know of what happened to Veronica in the intervening years? Why did Veronica choose to bring Tony to see the young Adrian? Why was Tony so drawn to the group going on their supervised visits to the shops and pub after that first introduction?
We know that Tony changes reality for the reader (and himself), and when he says that Adrian is of similar height and frame to ‘Adrian the Elder’, can we fully trust him to be doing anything more than what he has done in the past? It may well an act of wiping out his presence from the devastation that was Veronica’s own fate after that visit to the Bore: ‘There is responsibility. And beyond these, there is unrest. There is great unrest.’ Surely in these lines is Tony somewhat cryptically reflecting on Tony?
Psychologically, it seems clear what has motivated much of the action. Adrian, himself deprived of parents in childhood, is an easy mark for Sarah. Sarah, perhaps unloved by her alcoholic husband and jealous of that husband’s relationship with his entitled daughter, exacts an impetuous revenge by sleeping with Adrian. Adrian, overwhelmed by both the long-gestating depression resulting from his own broken childhood and the prospect of launching another unloved child (broken egg) out into the world, takes his own life. THat all makes sense. What doesn’t is Tony’s enormous guilt in this. Yes, he writes a scabrous, hurtful letter. But to imagine that this letter brought about all of these events — and led to everyone’s lives turning out the way they did 40 years later — is to give this “average” man a lot more power than he deserves. Unless that’s his happy ending — feeling truly consequential, at last…
I think that’s right on. And I think it’s really a part of human nature to insert ourselves into any tragedy or success that we’re remotely related to. One wonders how this story would look if it wasn’t narrated by Tony. Or what I’d really love is to see it narrated by Veronica.
After seeing and remembering the letter he had really written, rather than the gentler one he had earlier recounted, I started to reconsider Tony’s overall reliability as a narrator. If he could send that vile filled letter to Veronica and Adrian, which other parts of his story had he reconstructed to better fit his current view of who he is? In particular, I began to wonder if Veronica had the more accurate memory of their one sexual encounter. She felt she had been raped. Given Tony’s initial recounting of the events, that seemed improbable, but later I wondered if that’s what really happened. If so, Tony may be feeling guilty about all he did to Veronica – raping her and ruining her chance at a happy relationship with Adrian – even if he wasn’t directly responsible for the younger Adrian or the suicide.
Great post. The discussion of the end is excellent. I like ChrisL’s observation (expanded slightly by Jess) that Tony’s guilt may be a result of forcing him into someone else’s tragedy. He does, after all, say: “But if nostalgia means the powerful recollection of strong emotions—and a regret that such feelings are no longer present in our lives—then I plead guilty.”
In order to have those strong emotions he misses, he choose to hold himself responsible for the awful tragedies of Adrian(1), Adrian(2), and Veronica. His life seems, otherwise, pretty devoid of that sort of emotion. (And, there seems at least a hint that his letter may have fanned the flames a bit, if even he doesn’t actually bear responsibility for the fire.)
All in all, I was convinced that Tony felt terribly about events even if, from a dispassionate standpoint, we wouldn’t hold him morally culpable. He called down a curse and it came to fruition (and, as to Veronica, at least, quite unjustly). Neither he nor we believe such curses work, but doesn’t his having wished it true say something about his character, if not his direct culpability?
sorry if i forget can u remind whats the “b” in the equation… and what if the second “a” i.e. a2 is adrian’s son????
I think ‘b’ means baby. It’s therefore likely that ‘a2′ means Anthony (as was suggested in the book). But then again, why would so much emphasis really be based on Tony? Yes, his letter was disgusting and hurtful. However, I can still not see why he enters the ‘equation’ to such a degree. The letter hurt Adrian and Veronica, but surely both were intelligent enough to realise that he, Tony, was alos hurt and lashing out in an unsavoury way? Adrian was far intelligent enough not to take Tony’s word (to speak to Sarah’s mother and find out about the ‘damage’) when the letter was so obviously drunken, emotional and deliberately spiteful.
However… if A2 does not mean ‘Anthony’ and does indeed mean ‘Adrian 2′ then why would Adrian need to use both ‘b’ and ‘a2′ for one part of the equation?
I’m fascinated by the notion that Tony is Adrian’s father, and that his guilt is fueled by his own doubt about the accuracy of his memories of his encounter with Sarah. Yet in his first equation Adrian clearly takes responsibility for fathering the child. It seems more likely to me that, whether Tony slept with Sarah or not, he understood from her comment undercutting Veronica and her generally seductive behavior that she was making an offer. I think he turned her down by asking Sarah what she meant, and I think his guilt comes from remembering upon re-reading his horrific letter that he had deliberately crafted it to drive Adrian into Sarah’s open arms.
Also, is Chiselhurst a house of cheating, or perhaps an allusion to Chesil Beach?
I have a growing belief that Tony is young Adrian’s father, Veronica is his mother, she was called “mary” to indicate she was the mother and Adrian committed suicide rather than marry her carrying Tony’s child. That explains her comment of Blood Money better, I think. A1 and A2 in the equation are Adrian and Anthony, which is what Adrian called Tony. I can’t recall if there’s a comment early on that Adrian and Tony look enough alike for young Adrian to be mistaken by Tony as looking like Adrian. That also explains why Veronica wanted Tony to see Adrian, and why she again was frustrated by his not getting it.
[...] Severson wrote a good review of the novel’s ending over at Don’t Mind the Mess. It contains many spoilers, so finish the [...]
“The conclusion that young Adrian is the child of Sarah and older Adrian is unmistakable.”
Sorry, but I totally disagree.
I think the book is about the lies Tony tells to himself and why he tells them. It seems clear to me from scores of ‘clues’ that Tony is the father of young Adrian. Adrian realizes that when he sees Tony which is why he hides his face and is upset when Tony is around. Tony knows it too on a subconscious level which is why he keeps going back to try to see Adrian. Tony sees a physical similarity between the young Adrian and his dead friend Adrian in the same way he mischaracterizes, to himself and to the reader, so many of the other events of the past: because he can’t face the truth. He can’t be ‘open’ around other people, as one of the early clues indicates.
Why is everyone always saying Tony doesn’t get ‘it’? What is ‘it’? It can’t be only about the child and Sarah because Veronique starts with that line of observation before the baby is born and his wife’s contributions would suggest she also knows what ‘it’ is but doesn’t want to tell Tony (“You’re on your own now”). It would seem there is an ‘it’ known to all the main characters in this story (except Tony) which isn’t explicitly revealed to the reader.
The first page, and the last, are the keys to what really happened. For instance, why the continued focus by Tony on such a minor point as a broken egg when cooking? Why all the water imagery?
The clues have to be ferreted out by going back and reading and rereading many sections of the book after one finishes it–in its way it’s like the movie ‘Memento’. This is not a book to read on Kindle—the reviewer is correct there, in my opinion.
When Tony says something to the effect “had we been in a novel there might have been some sneaking between floors” and “making an excuse about extra towels”, you know that’s exactly what happened the night Sarah came to his attic room after the others had gone to bed and seduced him in her ‘slapdash’ way the night she became pregnant with his child.
Tony was given blood money because, contrary to first impression, it is he who was the wronged party by all of them—by Veronique, by Adrian, by Sarah (unintentionally), and by his wife.
The reviewer writes “Tony’s letter is horrific. I can’t imagine ever receiving such a thing from someone.”
My goodness. The things people do in fits of sexual jealousy go way beyond writing a letter like that.
And why is the reviewer sympathetic to Veronique, who he says must have been hurt by the letter? Doesn’t he think a greater wrong was done to Tony, whose closest, adored friend started sleeping with Tony’s first and only girlfriend?
As for Adrian, why conclude he ever slept with Sarah and that was why he killed himself? It seems to me he had a very good other reason for not being able to face himself any more.
In Tony’s first telling of when he went to see the Severn Bore, he was alone with his male friends. In the recounting, Veronique was there. Was Adrian?
Truth and illusion. I think that is what this book is about—not aging and the deficits of memory but repression and the way it can play tricks on a person’s mind and smother a person’s vitality in life and lead to…..great unrest.
[...] http://theseversons.net/reading-list/sense/ [...]
I don’t understand Veronicas attitude to Tony. Their relationship had mutually failed and a vague hint in a poisonous letter to Adrian about her mother does not make him culpable – this is Adrians decision.
I can’t accept that Tony slept with Sarah; no matter how memory plays tricks you wouldn’t forget this. A troubling ambiguous undercurrent about Tony (he’ll do won’t he) and everyone leaving Tony alone with Sarah that morning is suggestive of a family conspiracy to let them have sex/get pregnant. If there’s anything in this then it makes Veronicas attitude to Tony even more illogical.
What about the timing – did Adrian kill himself after the baby was born? Perhaps he couldn’t reconcile the idea of his clever logical world with a damaged child?
I don’t understand the significance of the strange hand waving gesture.
Not sure where I stand on the paternity of young Adrian, but if Tony is the father, I don’t think he “forgot” that he slept with Sarah. I think he is leaving it out. “That’s one of the central problems of history, isn’t it? …the fact that we need to know the history of the historian in order to understand the version that is being put in front of us (pg 13).” As the teller of the story, he leaves out, or glosses over, things that portray him in a bad light.
My take has been same as Rob R’s: a weird conspiracy of sorts – perhaps just Sarah and Veronica – to leave Tony and Sarah alone so he could have sex with her and, it seems, impregnate her. Veronica lies about his liking to sleep in – one of the few things he is sure about is that he has never liked to sleep in – and gets dad and Jack out of house. Why? Also, the recurring image of Sarah wanting to make him a better/unbroken egg seems of a piece with that. I don’t think he would forget sex with her either. He remembers masturbating after all and that is hardly usually a rare experience for young men – and women.
I think that the ‘Veronica’ which appears in the second half of the book, is not Veronica at all, but rather the daughter of Tony and Veronica….her actual name is Mary and she is the half brother of Adrian junior (read the passage in which Veronica chides Tony for not holding the condom on properly when they have sex). This is why even after several personal meetings with Tony, she tells him ‘you still don’t get it’. He does not see his only child, thinking only of everyone in the egoistic context of himself. What they say is unimportant, it is what Tony fails to see. Veronica and Adrian dedcided not to tell Tony about his child as he wrote them a terrible hate letter. Adrian junior is indeed the child of Sara and Adrian senior.
Excellent essay. Our book club is still discussing the novel. It seems to me the key to what happened are the few facts we have. 1. Adrian and Tony were friends 2. Adrian met Veronica through Tony 3. Adrian felt compelled to tell Tony he had started a relationship with Veronica. 4. Tony writes a mean letter. 5. Adrian kills himself. 6. Sarah has Adrian’s diary and leaves it to Tony, with $500. 7. There is a mentally challenged man named Adrian, whose caregivers believe is the son of Sarah and brother of Veronica.
Those seem the simplest facts. The main one is Sarah having Adrian’s diary. There is no story without that fact. So what does it signify? That Adrian and Sarah had a relationship of enough duration to warrant her having his diary. To me, whatever Veronica found in that diary (after discovering it unexpectedly in her mother’s things!?) forms the basis of her rage at the end of the book– and Tony’s involvement in a bit of history that really doesn’t belong to him, other than he introduced Adrian to Veronica.
(What if Veronica learned of Adrian2′s existence OR that he was the son of Adrian from the diary? Wouldn’t you drive a bit erratically?)
What Sarah does, by leaving the diary to Tony, is tell The Secret. Veronica may call it “blood money,” but that’s her opinion, and we’ll never know why Sarah remembers Tony in her will. Desperate to tell someone the truth, hoping to pay for his silence? We can’t know. So discuss all you want.
The larger issues, as you, Jess, write, are the meaning of memory, fact, history, and our involvement with one another. I agree with the commenter above who scoffs at the power of the letter Tony wrote to change history. It’s nothing, really. Haven’t we all done something so stupid when drunk? That letter never drove Adrian to do anything.
Let’s look at Adrian. From a broken home. An intellectual who dazzles people with his thought process. A man who has sex with his girlfriend’s mother who is old enough to be his mother and impregnates her. Who still tries to figure out human nature with mathematical equations. Who partially betrays his best friend by taking up with his ex-girlfriend without permission. That’s not necessarily a formula for suicide, but it’s also not a recipe for happiness. What would YOU do? Tell your girlfriend the truth? And risk destroying her family? Break up with your girlfriend and pretend it never happened?
Lastly, Sarah does not seduce Adrian. She preys on him. As a 40+ yr old woman having sex, in repressed 1960s England, with a 20 yr old male– that’s tantamount to sexual abuse, imo. When Sarah gives Tony the waist-high wave, it’s an almost obscene and secretive gesture, indicating that she knows no boundaries between her desires and her daughter’s well-being. Sarah is a narcissistic predator, and Veronica grew up with that.
In a few moments of Tony’s memory, on the beach, dancing in his room, Veronica and Tony dare to find intimacy and love. Neither was brave enough to pursue it, pursue real love and trust. And in the face of such fear of intimacy, ugliness and secrets win.
Who was Adrian senior’s mother? Could it have been Sara?