Stella Rimmington
A readable Booker? Whatever next!
29 March 2012 , 0
I’m knee-deep in books about organ donation at the moment (including some of questionable literary merit), so a masterclass in good writing seemed an attractive diversion.
How’s this for an opening paragraph?
‘I remember in no particular order:
– a shiny inner wrist;
– steam rising from a wet sink as a hot frying pan is laughingly tossed into it;
– gouts of sperm circling a plughole, before being sluiced down the length of a tall house;
– a river rushing nonsensically upstream, its wave and wash lit by half a dozen chasing torchbeams;
– another river, broad and grey, the direction of its flow disguised by a stiff wind exciting the surface;
– bathwater long gone cold behind a locked door.
This last isn’t something I actually saw, but what you end up remembering isn’t always the same as what you have witnessed.’
Intrigued? Yes, indeedy, so was I. Each of these memories gives a glimpse of an event we want to know about.
The Sense of an Ending is the story of Anthony Webster, a rather nondescript and timid divorced man in his 60s reflecting back on his life leading up to a shocking revelation. This is triggered by a bequest from the mother of an old college friend whom he met only once 40 years before. So why would she be leaving him money? His memory tracks back over schooldays, student days, affairs, marriage and divorce, retirement. Mistakes. Realisation gradually dawns.
But the book is also about memory – its subjectivity, its selectivity, its malleability. And the ending stops you in your tracks, making you want to go back and read it all again for the cues you missed first time around.
It’s a compact little book – a novella it’s been called – a mere 150 pages with wide spacing. Easily read in one sitting. And that’s been one of the ongoing criticisms of those who object to its selection as the Man Booker winner for 2011.
The judges, led by Dame Stella Rimmington, have also been castigated for putting ‘readibility’ onto their list of criteria. Hello? I’m one of those who are very glad they did. So many Booker winners are impenetrable to us ordinary mortals. Besides, as the judges themselves were at pains to emphasise, it wasn’t readability at the expense of quality writing, but in addition to.
And the quality is certainly there. In spades. Julian Barnes is a formidable writer in such command of language that he manages to convey profound truths through deceptively simple lives and actions. I won’t spoil the experience for those of you who’ve yet to read this book, but here are a couple of examples of Barnes’ mastery of his art.
Old Joe Hunt, the wryly affable history teacher, is challenging a class of pretentious boys as to the origins of the First World War. A new lad gives him a lengthy philosophical exposition ranging over culpability, anarchy, subjectivity and truth. A silence follows this, the other boys wondering if this is an attempt at ridiculing Old Joe; realising it isn’t. Then …
‘Old Joe Hunt looked at his watch and smiled. ‘Finn, I retire in five years. And I shall be happy to give you a reference if you care to take over.’
And he isn’t ridiculing anyone either.
Then there’s a wonderful sentence describing the narrator’s feelings when he hears about a lad who ‘auditions‘ girls by sleeping with them in order to decide which one ‘to go out‘ with. He himself has not slept with any girl to date (I should perhaps explain, the context was the prevailing morality of the 60s).
‘This made me feel like a survivor from some antique bypassed culture whose members were still using carved turnips as a form of monetary exchange.’
Well worth reading as an example of concise and powerful writing. The unravelling of a mystery is secondary. All grist to my mill.
But in the midst of this reading orgy, I’m trying to make time to enjoy the glories of spring and this unseasonable heatwave.
Julian Barnes, Man Booker prize, spring, Stella Rimmington, The Sense of an Ending