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?
13 Responses to The End of “The Sense of an Ending”
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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.