Monthly Archives: July 2012

The Sense of an Ending

This is a very well written book. Lucid and wonderfully perceptive, Barnes’ writing reminds me of McEwan’s.

The theme of the book is memory and how it creates a version of the past that doesn’t match up with other people’s versions or even one’s own version from a different time. That’s before ‘The Truth’ even comes into consideration. The blurb calls it ‘the story of one man coming to terms with the mutable past’.

I found the ending a little odd because some details are missing, leaving the reader to fill in the gaps using their imagination. At first I thought I had missed something but I found discussions about the conclusion on online forums expressing similar opinions to mine. However, I can forgive that since the book is a very good read; I was completely absorbed in the narrator’s journeys through his memories. The book strikes several nerves with me: I am painfully aware that I attempt to rewrite my own history (I suppose to try to save face) and I am always producing justifications for my illogical actions. Perhaps one day I will train myself to be more logical, like Mark is. In the meantime I will be very careful about what I say in all my written communications…

This is my favourite passage:
[Adrian] had a better mind and a more rigorous temperament than me; he thought logically, and then acted on the conclusion of logical thought. Whereas most of us, I suspect, do the opposite: we make an instinctive decision, then build up an infrastructure of reasoning to justify it. And call the rest common sense.

Of course it’s deliberate but reading through some bits of the book again, they are chillingly prophetic. This is one of Adrian’s speeches in a History lesson:

‘Indeed, isn’t the whole business of ascribing responsibility a kind of cop-out? We want to blame an individual so that everyone else is exculpated. Or we blame a historical process as a way of exonerating individuals. Or it’s all anarachic chaos, with the same consequence. It seems to me that there is – was – a chain of individual responsibilities, all of which were necessary, but not so long a chain that everybody can simply blame everyone else. But, of course, my desire to ascribe responsibility might be more a reflection of my own cast of mind than a fair analysis of what happened. That’s one of the central problems of history, isn’t it, sir? The question of subjective versus objective interpretation, the fact that we need to now the history of the historian in order to understand the version that is being put in front of us.’

(26th in 2012)

Cranford

This was my reading group’s book of the month. Again, it’s not one I would have chosen to read myself but that’s one of the reasons I joined a group: to discover new writing.

I found Cranford quite difficult to read; the construction of sentences and vocabulary used are very unfamiliar to me. I also found the first chapter – Our Society – very annoying. All the silly rules they live by and the way everyone colludes to keep up appearances.

As I got used to the style of the writing I was more able to appreciate the humour and poignant moments in the book: the cat swallowing the lace that was soaked in milk, the cow dressed in flannel and Martha nudging a guest when he took too long to help himself to potatoes and the card game where they didn’t want to wake the snoozing Mrs Jamieson but at the same time endeavoured to accommodate Mrs Forrester’s deafness. The funniest was when Lady Glenmire gets engaged while Mrs Jamieson is away: ‘The person whom she had left in charge of her house to keep off followers from her maids to set up a follower of her own!’

There are sad times: the death of Peter’s mother, the death of Miss Deborah Jenkyns. I felt for Miss Matty when she starts to wear a widow’s hood after the death of Mr Holbrook. She is forced to face the loss of her youth, the missed chances of married life and children but she puts a brave face on it, saying how lucky she is to have such good friends.

It is touching that, in the end, friendships do prevail. When Miss Matty become bankrupt her friends club together to anonymously help her financially, when Miss Jessie Brown wants to follow her father’s corpse to the grave, Miss Deborah Jenkyns accompanies her even though women didn’t usually attend funerals ‘in polite society’.

I watched a couple of episodes of the BBC dramatisation of Cranford when I was halfway through the book. It brought the book alive for me. I don’t think I’d have enjoyed the remainder of the book as much if I hadn’t seen the characters and places brought to life on screen; I needed it to fire up my imagination.

Note: If you’re going to read this book for the first time I would recommend the version that the above photo links to (rather than the free Kindle version) as it contains notes, a glossary and interesting appendices.

(25th in 2012)