Russell’s writing is as clear as a window pane, and he uses copious everyday examples to illustrate every point. He starts off, for example, by considering his desk. He is asking whether we can really know anything with any certainty, and shows that even the desk in front of him is not as apparently solid and unchanging as it at first appears. Its shape changes depending on viewpoint, its colour shifts with the light, its texture is smooth when viewed from a distance but rugged when viewed through a microscope, and so on.

He uses this to lead into Descartes system of systematic doubt, i.e. not believing anything unless he was quite certain it was true. Doing this, it becomes clear, makes us reevaluate many of the things that common sense tells us are true and real. How do we know, for example, that the sun will rise tomorrow? We may say that it has risen every morning in the past, or we may give an answer based on the laws of motion. But in either case, we have to ask ourselves whether we truly know that something will happen simply because it has happened that way countless times in the past. Russell give the wonderful example of a chicken receiving food from a man every day of its life, until at last the man wrings its neck. The chicken may have been reasonable to expect food based on past occurrences, but “more refined views as to the uniformity of nature would have been useful to the chicken.”

Russell uses similar vivid examples and clear language to explain various philosophical concepts and ways of thinking, such as induction (which starts from the particular to arrive at other particulars or general principles) and deduction (which goes from general principles to other general principles or to the particular). He gives quick portraits of the views of philosophers such as Kant and Hegel, before finishing with a wonderful summary of the value of studying philosophy, in which he admits that philosophy still has large unanswered questions, but states that as a virtue rather than a flaw:

The value of philosophy is, in fact, to be sought largely in its very uncertainty. The man who has no tincture of philosophy goes through life imprisoned in the prejudices derived from common sense … Philosophy, though unable to tell us with certainty what is the true answer to the doubts which it raises, is able to suggest many possibilities which enlarge our thoughts and free them from the tyranny of custom.

I like this idea of valuing the questions rather than the answers, of embracing uncertainty as superior to false certainty. The final paragraph is beautiful:

Philosophy is to be studied … because these questions enlarge our conception of what is possible, enrich our intellectual imagination, and diminish the dogmatic assurance which closes the mind against speculation; but above all because, through the greatness of the universe which philosophy contemplates, the mind also is rendered great, and becomes capable of that union with the universe which constitutes its highest good.

Having said all that, I did find myself weirdly enjoying this book as I read it. It’s clear that Serge’s blankness as a character is intentional. He drifts through some quite amazing experiences, and yet never seems to be fully participating in them. He likes to see the world as flat, not three-dimensional, and so as an artist can never master perspective; it’s only when he’s in a World War One aeroplane looking down on the landscape that he feels things to be “just right, …  just how things should be.” He watches as it “falls away, it flattens, it voids itself of depth. Hills lose their height, roads lose their camber, bounce, the texture of their paving, and turn into marks across a map… Now the land’s surface starts to tip, its horizontal line rotating round the Farman’s nose as though the vegetation, soil and brick that formed it were all one big front propeller…”  He feels the machine to be controlling the landscape, as if “all displacement and acceleration, all shifts and realignment must proceed from the machine…”

Serge feels that such a flat world controlled by machinery is “just right”. His obsession with technology, drugs and sex prefigures many of the developments of the twentieth century, while remnants of the old, such as his Huguenot silk-weaving mother, seem to fade away, to be already a part of the past. It’s a poignant view of a time of great transition, comparable to the current transition to an increasingly digitised, hyper-connected world. Serge is a great observer of the world around him (in the war that’s even his role, not pilot but “observer”), and this extends even into his own life, so that he appears not to be creating the events of his life but merely drifting along observing them along with the reader.

Serge is born with a caul, traditionally a sign of good luck and safety from drowning, but also in this book the start of recurring symbols of obscured vision, such as the strange gauzy film that descends across Serge’s eyes after the death of his sister and necessitates a trip to a European spa town. The luck comes mainly in his inability to die amid the carnage of the war, despite being hooked on heroin as he’s flying and despite almost everyone around him getting killed, including the pilot of his plane (Serge survives by having his fall cushioned by someone else’s parachute – the parachutist also dies, but Serge is unharmed). The unbelievable luck even extends to him being captured as a spy and lined up in front of a firing squad, only for news of the armistice to come through just before the order to fire is given. The soldiers turn around to go home, and Serge calls out “Hey! You can’t do that. Wait!”

There’s a lot to chew on here, too much probably for one blog post. Parts of the novel reminded me of JG Ballard, particularly when Serge is in the aeroplane and the metal, technology and violence get fused with sexual excitement, making him ejaculate over the tail. Crash, too, was a novel that I enjoyed for its writing and its ideas, even though the plot and characters were scarcely believable. Almost every woman Serge meets inexplicably wants to have sex with him – maybe it’s that caul giving him luck, but it struck me as weird and unbelievable on the level of individual character. Much of the book was the same, and at times I became frustrated with the lack of traditional plot and character development. But it’s a novel about ideas, not so much about characters and their motivations. If read purely on that level, it’s an interesting and at times beautifully written book with plenty of thought-provoking ideas. I’m certainly glad I read it. If you’re looking for a plot that draws you in and characters you can root for, though, I’d recommend looking elsewhere.

The story first of all: it starts in Paris 1940, with a group of young jazz musicians lying around drunk and hungover in their recording studio, two of them going out for milk, and one of them, the genius trumpet player Hieronymus Falk, being arrested by the Gestapo and shipped off to a concentration camp. Then it switches to Baltimore 1992 and Sid Griffiths as an old man on his way to a festival celebrating the work of the posthumously-famous Falk, and from there it shuttles back and forth between the past (Berlin 1939 to Paris 1940) and the present (Sid and his friend Chip trying to find out what really happened to Hiero, and wondering whether to believe in the possibility that he’s alive after all).

The time shifts work well, and there’s plenty of suspense all the way through. Edugyan also handles very well the growing sense that things are not quite as they were described in the first chapter, by introducing jealousy, bitterness and rivalry within the group, both over differences in talent and over a woman, Delilah. The writing is good, a convincing evocation of the voice of the African-American narrator Sid Griffiths. Here’s a sample of the voice, from the first paragraph:

Chip told us not to go out. Said, don’t you boys tempt the devil. But it been one brawl of a night, I tell you, all of us still reeling from the rot – rot was cheap, see, the drink of French peasants, but it stayed like nails in you gut. Didn’t even look right, all mossy and black in the bottle. Like drinking swamp water.

Perhaps part of the problem was that although we spend a lot of time with the characters, some of them remain unclear (to me at least). Hieronymus Falk, Hiero, “the kid”, the tragic genius, is quite anonymous. That’s how his personality is set up – shy and withdrawn, a coping method from growing up black in 1920s-30s Germany. Sid is very convincing, since he is the narrator and we have full access to his thoughts. But the other band members are less distinct, particularly at the beginning when there are six of them and a lot of ensemble scenes where they all joke around with each other but you don’t develop much sense of the individuals. Later on things focus in on Sid, Chip, Hiero and Delilah and then things become a little clearer, but even then I didn’t really feel the characters fully.

Much of this, of course, is because Sid is the narrator and he’s not always very perceptive. He misreads others’ intentions, misunderstands them, and so his limited perspective holds us back from seeing the other characters fully. Yes, I think that’s it! It’s effective as a plot device, but acts as a barrier between the reader and the other characters. I think that’s the main thing that held me back from loving this book wholeheartedly. But as I said, it’s still a really good read with plenty of good writing and a compelling story that’s just begging for a film adaptation. Sense of an Ending is still my favourite to win the Booker, but this one certainly merits its place on the shortlist.

The overall effect is at first simply confusing and then, when you get used to it, powerfully disorientating. It’s a book I had to concentrate on more than usual, and even then I always felt on edge, never knowing when in mid-sentence the story would shift to something completely different. Often the shifts were so subtle that for a few lines I thought I was still in the main scene on the Flanders Road in World War Two, when in fact things had changed and we were at an earlier stage of the war when dead characters were still alive, or we were later when the war’s over and one of the characters was meeting his dead comrade’s widow, or we had gone back 200 years to the story of a distant ancestor who blew his brains out.

Did I enjoy reading it? I have to be honest and say not really. But, on the other hand, I don’t regret reading it at all. I read it because Romanian writer Cosmin Manolache listed Claude Simon as one of his influences in the book Best European Fiction 2010, and I liked Manolache’s story so thought I would try this. I did find it an interesting experiment, and one which made me think and question, which is always good. Claude Simon is apparently part of the nouveau roman school of French writers in the 1950s and 60s who tried to find ways of departing from the traditional story-telling techniques, which they saw as imposing an artificial order on events which are really senseless. But isn’t that what a writer is supposed to do – to interpret events, to select from the random chaotic mess of reality and use certain skills and techniques to shape it into a story? Yes, it is artificial in a sense, and bad novels can drastically oversimplify the world, but what do we gain by abandoning the attempt altogether?

Well, I suppose maybe we do gain that sense of disorientation and questioning, maybe we think a little more about the novels we read, and maybe that’s beneficial. Claude Simon won the Nobel Prize for his efforts, and I can see why – it is quite an achievement. But still I’m glad that this technique remained an experiment, and that most of the novels I read do have such artificial elements as plot, logic, chronology, clarity, helpful punctuation, etc. To give you a little taste, here’s the first sentence:

He was holding a letter in his hand, he raised his eyes looked at me then the letter again then once more at me, behind him I could see the red mahogany ochre blurs of the horses being led to the watering trough, the mud was so deep you sank into it up to your ankles but I remember that during the night it had frozen suddenly and Wack came into the bedroom with the coffee saying The dogs ate up the mud, I had never heard the expression, I could almost see the dogs, some kind of infernal, legendary creatures their mouths pink-rimmed their wolf fangs cold and white chewing up the black mud in the night’s gloom, perhaps a recollection, the devouring dogs cleaning, clearing away: now the mud was grey and we twisted our ankles running, late as usual for morning call, almost tripping in the deep tracks left by the hoofs and frozen hard as stone, and a moment later he said Your mother’s written me.

Although it’s a short book, it felt to me like a whole novel, not a novella. It covers the whole lifespan of its narrator, Tony, from adolescence to old age, and never feels rushed. There are quite a few characters and all are fully drawn – even relatively minor ones like Tony’s girlfriend’s older brother feel quite real.

Barnes achieves this with a quite massive jump in the middle, skipping over the majority of Tony’s life in a few paragraphs and catapulting him from his early twenties into sudden old age. It reminded me of the “Time Passes” section of Virginia Woolf’s To the Lighthouse, and had a similar effect for me of highlighting how much of what we think is important is rendered utterly irrelevant by the passing of time. Forty years later, Tony has lost touch with his friends, married and divorced, had a career, a child, grandchildren. His younger self seems like a different person altogether – when he is presented with a spiteful letter he wrote after a breakup with his girlfriend, he is genuinely shaken: “My younger self had come back to shock my older self with what that self had been, or was, or was sometimes capable of being.”

Yet some things do remain the same across the decades. Tony’s need to understand his friend’s suicide is undimmed, and as soon as he is given some documents from the past that might explain things, he plunges straight back into the past again, even to the point of wanting to get back together with his old girlfriend Veronica. One of the documents is the friend’s diary, written in point form with highly philosophical language, like Wittgenstein’s Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, a book I failed to read or comprehend. I did recognise another quote from the book, though: “Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent.” The original explanation was that the friend killed himself because he had rationally thought through the nature of life and acted on the consequences. But the truth, we suspect, is more complex, more emotional, less intellectually pure, and the hints at a different conclusion are what keep us reading.

There’s so much in this short book – so much story, so much character, so many ideas. I could probably end up writing a review longer than the book itself if I explored every observation. Quicker and more efficient, I think, simply to recommend this book, and to keep it on my shelf and re-read frequently. I fully expect it to win the Booker, for which it has been shortlisted, although perhaps that’s unfair because I haven’t read the others on the list. Certainly if another book wins I’ll be certain to read it, because to better this one would be quite a feat.

By the way, for those of you who are interested, I can tell you that Julian Barnes’s signature is small, neat and entirely free of any kind of flourish. It looks as if he just wrote down his name in his normal handwriting. Maybe nobody cares, but I thought it was interesting!

For another review I wrote of a lesser-known Julian Barnes book, click here.

For more reviews of The Sense of an Ending, I can recommend Nivedita Barve, Asylum, or check out the Complete Booker site.