The Sense of an Ending

The book discusses how history may differ when told by different sources or at different times -- or "history is that certainty produced at the point where the imperfections of memory meet the inadequacies of documentation," if you are Adrian Finn. With this premise, I'm left confused by the ending. Seriously, I'm not sure who isn't. But if you don't mind these kind of twists, this may be for you.

The story started with Tony's life at school with his friends Alex, Colin, and Adrian, who moved to the school in a later year. Adrian was that smart student who asked all sorts of questions and often came up with answers that were understood by others only half of the time -- that kind of classmate. They all went to different universities afterwards but remained friends.

In college, Tony had a relationship with Veronica, whom he later described as difficult and manipulative. He visited Veronica's family one weekend, meeting her parents and brother Jack. It was an awkward three days with the entire family's weird, sometimes condescending remarks, questions and winks. At one point during the visit, her mother Sarah vaguely warned Tony about Veronica. Their relationship eventually ended, and soon Veronica started a relationship with Adrian. About a year later, Adrian committed suicide.

Now 40 years have passed. Sarah has died, and Tony is contacted by her lawyer who tells him that Sarah had left him with £500 and two documents, one of which is Adrian's diary. The diary, however, is in Veronica's hands, and she's not exactly an easy person to reach. When Tony finally manages to contact her, she tells him that she had burned the diary. Before they meet, she also suggests in her e-mail to Tony that the £500 is most likely "blood money", with no further explanation.

Eventually, Veronica sends Tony a page from Adrian's diary that mentions Tony's name in a cut-off sentence. Later, she also sends him a copy of his letter to her and Adrian at the start of their relationship. The letter is vile and includes Tony's ill wishes towards Veronica and Adrian's children, if the two have any together in the future.

Reading it now, Tony regrets the letter. Still hoping that he could learn the reason behind Adrian's suicide, Tony tries to spend some time with Veronica. During one of the meetings, Veronica shows him a mentally disabled man, again, with no explanation because this is Veronica.

A few weeks later, Tony tracks down the man with his care worker at a pub and realizes that the man looks like Adrian. Tony concludes that the man is Veronica and Adrian's child and feels guilty about the things he said in the letter. On another visit, however, specifically on the last few pages of the book, Tony is shocked with a new detail. Turns out, the man is actually Sarah's son, which Tony assumes is from her affair with Adrian. And seriously, the book ends there.

And I swear this is not the type of book which the answers to its twists are hidden somewhere in the plot -- that you only have to dig deeper to find them. No, this is just a bait into a prolonged confusion because the key to the twist is just deliberately not told in the plot!

Because, why the £500 that Veronica says blood money? Did Adrian commit suicide after learning that he and Sarah were having a child, one who was disabled just like Tony's wishes? What's Great Art? And true to the suggestion that history may differ when told by different people and our discovery that Tony is a little bit of an unreliable narrator -- did Tony also have an affair with Sarah? Which possibly made the disabled man Sarah and Tony's son, not Sarah and Adrian's? I'm not sure if I caught this last part in the book, though. I think I only read it from some reviews while trying to understand the ending. Please don't make me reread the book.

Image: Knopf Doubleday