It was a 'slightly odd thing', he cautiously admits, to pretend to his ex-wife when they first met that Veronica had never existed (and then later give such a one-sided account of her that she's known within their marriage as 'The Fruitcake'). In one of the book's many slow-rumbling ironies, the second section undermines the veracity of these expertly drawn memories, as Tony reopens his relationship with Veronica, a woman he had previously edited out of his life story. It's a lightly sketched portrait of awkwardness and repression at a time when yes, it was the 60s, 'but only for some people, only in certain parts of the country'. The novella divides into two parts, the first being Tony's memoir of 'book-hungry, sex-hungry' sixth form days, and the painful failure of his first relationship at university, with the spiky, enigmatic Veronica. It is a solicitor's letter informing him that, 40 years on, he has been left Adrian's diary in a will, that sets Tony to examining what he thinks his life has been. Looming largest in his personal mythology is his brilliant, tragic, Camus-reading schoolfriend Adrian (another echo of Nothing to Be Frightened Of here: in that book Barnes remembers a similar friend by the fitting but unlikely name of Alex Brilliant). On harsher inspection, 'I had wanted life not to bother me too much, and succeeded – and how pitiful that was.' Barnes is brutally incisive on the diminishments of age: now that the sense of his own ending is coming into focus, Tony apprehends that 'the purpose of life is to reconcile us to its eventual loss', that he has already experienced the first death: that of the possibility of change.īut like all of us, he has carried his youth inside him into adulthood, fixed in vivid memory. In one light, his life has been a success: a career followed by comfortable retirement, an amiable marriage followed by amicable divorce, a child seen safely into her own domestic security. Like so many of Barnes's narrators, Tony Webster is resigned to his ordinariness even satisfied with it, in a bloody-minded way.

The sense of an ending review