On the first page of Julian Barnes’s short (150 pages) novel, The Sense of an Ending (2011), the narrator, Tony Webster sets out one of his premises:

We live in time — it holds us and moulds us — but I’ve never felt I understood it very well. And I’m not referring to theories about how it bends and doubles back, or may exist elsewhere in parallel versions. No, I mean ordinary, everyday time, which clocks and watches assure us passes regularly: tick-tock, click-clock. (p. 3)

As someone who is neither a scientist nor a philosopher, I was immediately relieved to read that the narrator was not referring to physicists’ theories or to esoteric thought experiments. My own commonsense, unsophisticated notion of time differs from his though, and at first I found myself wanting to argue with the narrator, maintaining that time is an abstraction, not something that we can conceive of ourselves as being “in”, or that is capable of holding or moulding us. It quickly became clear to me that such an argument would be beside the point. Tony’s subject is not really time but memory. Memory presupposes that time should pass but it doesn’t depend on our having a phlosophically or scientifically sound idea of what time is.

Tony Webster is an unexceptional man: he’s in his mid 60s, retired after an unremarkable working life spent in arts administration, long divorced from a woman with whom he is still (or again) friendly, a woman who, they both agree, is the opposite of enigmatic. They have a daughter, Susie, and grandchildren. His memory is deliberately selective: he remembers his schooldays but really only to recount how his friend group of three was joined by the more intellectual Adrian Finn, who would win a scholarship to Cambridge. Toby studied history in Bristol, where he met and started “going out” (p. 21) with Veronica. When she takes him to visit her family in Chislehurst he finds her father and brother patronizing and supercilious but her mother is apparently well disposed toward him, though she warns him not to “let Veronica get away with too much” (p. 28). He doesn’t know what to make of this.

Tony and Veronica break up before their final year in college. He subsequently receives a letter from Adrian, telling him and Adrian and Veronica are now going out and hoping that Tony will “accept” (p. 41) this state of affairs. Adrian says he wrote the letter at Veronica’s urging. Tony replied at first with a flippant postcard, followed by a more serious reply.

As far as I remember, I told him pretty much what I thought of their joint moral scruples. I also advised him to be prudent, because in my opinion Veronica had suffered damage a long way back. Then I wished him good luck, burnt his letter in an empty grate (melodramatic, I agree, but I plead youth as a mitigating circumstance), and decided that the two of them were now out of my life for ever. (pp. 42–3)

Some 40 years afterwards, Veronica will send him a copy of his letter, which is much more cruel and vicious than he had remembered, as well as being vituperatively misogynistic towards Veronica.

After university, Tony spent 6 months travelling around the United States and came home to the news that Adrian had killed himself. When they had been at school, a classmate had killed himself after he had got his girlfriend pregnant. (His suicide note was rumoured to have read “Sorry, Mum”, p. 14.) Adrian had cited Camus as stating that suicide was the only true philosophical question, and had spoken about life as an unsought gift which each of us has the right to refuse.

Decades later, after Tony had retired, he received a solicitor’s letter telling him that Sarah Ford, Veronica’s mother, had died, leaving him £500 and two documents. One of the documents was a letter from her, telling him that Adrian had always spoken warmly of him and that she was leaving him Adrian’s diary, which she thought he might find “an interesting, if painful memento of long ago” (p. 65). She added that she thought the last months of Adrian’s life were happy. The second document, then, was the diary, which Veronica withheld and claimed to have burnt. Toby made several attempts to get her to turn it over but none was successful and eventually he gave up.

Toby’s efforts to obtain possession of Adrian’s diary resulted in his meeting Veronica several times. She repeatedly told him that he just didn’t get it and he never would. He discovered that Adrian had had a son, also named Adrian, who was now about 40 and living in an institution, apparently with a learning difficulty or developmental disorder. He had been very upset by Sarah Ford’s death. Ultimately, Tony discovers that Adrian Jr’s mother is not Veronica (who is now apparently using her middle name, Mary).

Tony is what is sometimes called a peripheral narrator: someone who is not directly involved in the story being told, but observing from the edges. The quintessential example of a peripheral narrator is The Great Gatsby’s Nick Carraway, who narrates not his own story but that of Gatsby and the Buchanans. It occurs to me just now that another example that I particularly like is that of George Mason in Scott Turow’s Personal Injuries. (Mason’s own story is told, in the third person, in the later Limitations.)

Toby Webster is unusual in that, while he tells us the story of Adrian Finn, Veronica Mary Elizabeth Ford and the latter’s mother, Sarah, he never learns the whole story himself. He is left to speculate as to the reasons for Adrian’s suicide (which he assumes must be discoverable given Adrian’s rationality), as to his friend’s state of mind at the time of his death, the contents of his diary, Sarah’s reasons for apparently wishing that Tony should read the diary so many years later, and what Veronica/Mary felt about the whole sad business. He couldn’t trust his memory to tell him quite how badly he himself had behaved. The reader, too, is left to speculate. We never learn (any more than Tony does) the circumstances of Adrian Jr’s conception. We can guess but we can’t be sure.

There is a huge gap in the story that Tony tells, reflected in the fact that the narrative jumps from Tony’s early 20s to his mid 60s, not long after he has retired. He reminds us that the story he is attempting to tell is not quite his own. While he was in the US, he had become involved with a woman named Annie, with whom he spent three months.

Annie was part of my story, but not of this story. (p. 46)

Barnes’s handling of this teasing narrative is admirably clever and skillful but I did not find it satisfying. What I think particularly clever is that the gaps in the story are not wholly, or even mainly, the results of Tony’s deceptive memory. He may have forgotten, or convinced himself he had forgotten, the details of his hurtful letter to Adrian and Veronica but he later reproduces the document in full (having been sent a copy by Veronica, who must have kept it for 40 years). The lacunae are not things that Tony has forgotten but things he never knew in the first place, so that the riff on time and memory on the novel’s first page is seen to be an adroit piece of misdirection. It leads us to expect the kind of “memory” novel that has often been written before, whereas what Barnes gives us is much more unusual. I almost wish I liked it better.

Until I began to write this post, I thought of Kazuo Ishiguro’s The Remains of the Day (1989) as another novel whose narrator tells of events in which he has not been directly involved and which he has imperfectly understood. It seemed to me that the novel was one of several in which Ishiguro exposed a central character’s shortcomings in the character’s own account of events whose importance he or she perceived but dimly. So, in this novel, Stevens at first came across as a character so wrapped up in his own narrow aspiration to being a “great” butler that he failed to appreciate the extent to which Lord Darlington had become a Nazi sympathizer and would-be collaborator. His apparent blind spot where Darlington was concerned, combined with his futile attempts to develop an ability to banter, and his failure to pick up on Miss Kenton’s obvious hints that she did not after all wish to marry Mr Benn, make him seem a pathetic figure, one whose self-exposure can only an act of cruelty on the part of the novelist.

It’s only in the last few days, on my third reading of the novel, that I see that I see that Stevens is a more self-interested, astute and to some extent malign character than I had given him credit for, and not at all pitiable. In the last quarter of the short novel, he describes something that occurred in 1935, about four years before the start of the war, and after the Nazis had come to power in Germany. Lord Darlington is entertaining three guests, one of whom, Spencer, poses a series of questions to Stevens, to each of which the latter answers with a variant on “I am sorry, sir, … but I am unable to be of assistance on this matter” (p. 195).

Spencer’s questions are calculated to demonstrate the supposed absurdity of a democratic system of government which, in Spencer’s view, requires ordinary voters to form opinions on a variety of issues which are too complex for any but experts and specialists to grasp. These are the questions on which Stevens says he is unable to give an opinion:

“… do you suppose the debt situation regarding America is a significant factor in the present low levels of trade? Or do you suppose this is a red herring and that the abandonment of the gold standard is at the root of the matter?”

“… Would you say that the currency problem in Europe would be made better or worse if there were to be an arms agreement between the French and the Bolsheviks?” (p. 195)

“… What was M. Laval really intending, by his recent speech on the situation in North Africa? Are you also of the view that it was simply a ruse to scupper the nationalist fringe of his own domestic party?” (p. 196)

The next day, Darlington apologizes to the butler for “the ordeal we put you through last night” (p. 196) but Stevens is unperturbed. He has not been at all put out by the questions. He has described his response to the first one:

I was naturally a little surprised by this, but then quickly saw the situation for what it was, that is to say, it was clearly expected that I be baffled by the question. Indeed, in the moment or so that it took for me to perceive this and compose a suitable response, I may even have given the outward impression of struggling with the question, for I saw all the gentlemen in the room exchange mirthful smiles. (p. 195)

Stevens has correctly divined what he is being asked and delivered the appropriate, desired response. The fact that, more than 20 years later, he is able to recall the questions and report them as direct speech suggests that he fully understood them at the time, though he might have struggled to provide a substantive answer, had that really been what Spencer was asking for. And, if he understood questions about the gold standard and French politics, he must also have understood Darlington’s developing position, from an apparently well intentioned oppposition to the Treaty of Versailles (Keynes is mentioned as a visitor to Darlington Hall), through appeasement, hosting secret meetings between von Ribbentrop, the Prime Minister and Foreign Secretary and later conspiratorial activities, leading to a lost libel trial after the war. Steven gives more detail about the early stages of this development, suggesting that he was fully aware as to where it was leading. Similarly, his tendency to deny ever having worked for Darlington (in one instance causing embarrassment for his new employer, Mr Farraday) suggests that he is less innocent than he would sometimes like to appear.

Having belatedly realized that Stevens is, as I put it above, “a more self-interested, astute and to some extent malign character” than I had previously noticed, I’ve had to revise my opinion of The Remains of the Day, and I am no longer inclined to qualify my admiration for the novel, nor to describe it as one I don’t like.

I’ve been rereading what I wrote a few years ago about Never Let Me Go, suggesting that that novel’s narrator too is less innocent, altruistic and benevolent than she has sometimes been taken to be. While she clearly couldn’t be said to be wholly in control of her life or of what happens to her, she is far from passive. I see, however, that I haven’t made the argument as clearly as I meant to. I may try to rewrite it soon to make it more persuasive.

Editions: The Remains of the Day, Faber paperback, 1990, all ellipses added; The Sense of an Ending Jonathan Cape hardback, 2011.