“And no, it wasn’t shame I now felt, or guilt, but something rarer in my life and stronger than both: remorse. A feeling which is more complicated, curdled, and primeval. Whose chief characteristic is that nothing can be done about it: too much time has passed, too much damage has been done, for amends to be made.”

A retired man reminisces about his school days and all his friends and the moments they shared together. All this coming from his memory, the events as he remembers them. The Sense of An Ending raises important points, are our memories the lies that we tell ourselves? Do we really remember things as they were?

Tony Webster goes back down the memory lane to his school days and remembers three of his friends, especially Adrian, who was the most intellectual of them. He recalls small and big events from his school and college life. Tony recalls an interaction between Adrian and history teacher and especially remembers what Adrian has quoted about history.

“History is that certainty produced at the point where the imperfections of memory meet the inadequacies of documentation.”

The first part of the book is about Tony’s recollection of the past and his interpretation of it. His school days, and then all his friends moving out from the town to join college. Adrian was admitted to Cambridge, Tony got a girlfriend, Veronica, in his first year of college, he breaks up with her and then Adrian began dating Veronica. Tony got to know this when he received a letter from Adrian informing him that he is dating Veronica and wanted to let him know. He remembers what he thought about it and remember the letter he wrote back to Adrian cautioning him about the Veronica and wonder why he wrote that.

The story moves back and forth in the past and present. He received an inheritance from Veronica’s mother and wonders why. It has a 500 pound and a note saying that she has left him the diary of Adrian.  To know more about it he traces Veronica and tries to find out what about the diary who kept ignoring his emails to meet.

Finally, they meet and Tony tries to find out what had happened to Adrian but could not get any answer to it. There are things that Tony assumed to be true as per his memories and their interpretation, but things are not always the same as we think them to be. The author captures the essence of the novel with a fact that our memories are not always perfect, and we usually tend to remember things where we forgive ourselves for our own past actions. Our memories are biased towards us. We are mostly hero in our won memories.

“How often do we tell our own life story? How often do we adjust, embellish, make sly cuts? And the longer life goes on, the fewer are those around to challenge our account, to remind us that our life is not our life, merely the story we have told about our life. Told to others, but—mainly—to ourselves.”

The story is interesting and we get to read some philosophical gems about memories and history. Some readers might find it a bit slow, and some might say that the author did not explicitly disclose the ending. But the story is beyond that, read it for the sheer joy of reading some beautiful writing. Every sentence and paragraph is meticulously crafted, offering a quiet lesson in the power of brevity.