Veronica sleeps with Tony only after this to get back at her Mother. Tony did have an affair (if you can call a one night stand that) with Sara thus producing Adrian 2. What bothered me most was why did Sara leave Tony $500 and Adrian’s diary? andĪfter reading your conclusions and others commments, these are my thoughts: If you enjoyed this post, please have a look at my other book reviews, or check out the free stuff I’m offering to readers at the moment.Īndrew – thanks for the insights, they really helped Also feel free to check out other opinions in the reviews on Amazon. For my response to The Sense of an Ending as a whole, please see the original review. The ending was my least favourite part, and this post focused on the ending. I’d also like to make it clear that, while I’ve been quite critical of the book in this post, I actually really liked it. Let me know in the comments if you agree or disagree with anything I’ve said, or if there’s anything that’s still unclear – I’ll do my best to clear up any other loose ends. The Sense of an Ending explained, at least as I understand it. Doesn’t she bear responsibility too? Doesn’t her mother? Doesn’t Adrian himself? It seems to me that they bear more responsibility than Tony. She blamed Tony, apparently, but it seems too harsh. People were looking for Veronica’s irrationality and hostility to be explained, and it wasn’t. I think this is also responsible for some of the confusion over the ending. But her reasons for withholding all this information are not clear. It seemed to function as a plot device: the author needed to ration information out, to dripfeed it to the reader to maintain suspense, so if Veronica had explained everything immediately, there would have been no book. To me, Veronica’s obstructive behaviour throughout the novel was not very credible. So why was Veronica so angry at him all the time for not getting it? What was there for him to get? How could he possibly have got it? I also felt it was a revelation that Tony couldn’t possibly have guessed, any more than we could. Tony intended to hurt Adrian with his letter, but he couldn’t possibly have foreseen that when he said “Consult the mother”, Adrian would in fact sleep with the mother and then kill himself. He feels guilt, yes, because something terrible happened and he was involved, but is that the same as moral responsibility? Surely there has to be some cause and effect, some intent. But a man who accidentally runs over a child as he’s driving to work could just as easily say, “If only I’d left home a few minutes earlier, I never would have hit her.” Is he responsible, then, because he left home at that particular time? It’s true that if Tony hadn’t written the letter, perhaps Adrian would not have killed himself. I have to say, I think it’s a bit of a stretch to see Tony as responsible for Adrian’s death. As Tony says, “I looked at the chain of responsibility. The suggestion, then, is that Adrian’s suicide wasn’t an intellectual/philosophical decision after all, but a banal one on the same level as Robson’s suicide in their school days. Tony feels guilty because his spiteful letter drove Adrian to Veronica’s mother, which led them to produce a son, which led to his suicide. At least, I’m pretty sure it is, unless I’m like Tony and just don’t get it at all □ Perhaps you think you must have missed something, that a Booker-prize-winning novel must have something deeper to it than that. Now, I think perhaps the reason why people are confused is because this doesn’t seem like much of a revelation. The reason her mother had Adrian’s diary and said he had been happy in his last few months is because he had been with her. The reason Veronica kept saying throughout the book that Tony didn’t get it was because he never understood this link. So the big revelation is that Adrian had an affair with Veronica’s mother, and so the young Adrian is Veronica’s brother, not her son, as Tony had assumed.
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