Breathing Lessons, Everything I Never Told You and Arthur and George (and The Sense of an Ending)

On the face of it Breathing Lessons is a dull book about a day in the life of Maggie Moran, on her way to the funeral of the husband of her (best?) friend Serena. Lots of back story as she wonders about her life with Ira and her two children. But what elevates this story is the quality of Anne Tyler's writing:

Part Two starts with "For the past several months now, Ira had been noticing the human race's wastefulness. People were squandering their lives, it appeared to him. They were splurging their energies on petty jealousies or vain ambitions or long standing, bitter grudges. It was a theme that emerged wherever he turned, as if someone were trying to tell him something. Not that he needed to be told.. didn't he know well enough all he himself had wasted?"

There were only a couple of times when the book slightly loses it's way, particularly near the end when, for me, it should have concentrated on the present and not the past. But I really got into the characters even though Maggie makes you mad. And a road trip through the Eastern States was always a pleasure.

If you want to read a family drama, there are far better ones than Everything I Never Told You. Just because it knits in a mysterious death does not take it into great thriller territory, it just falls between the two genres. The only sympathetic character is the one who ends up dead, all the others have contributed in their own delusional way. This is not to say there are some neat passages in the back story. But why it won Amazon's book of the year, well you will have to ask them.

When I started this book, I didn't know that Arthur and George were real life characters. I try not to read reviews before I start a book. So I really enjoyed the first two thirds of this longish novel as it alternates between the lives of the two characters of the title. It was when I realised who Arthur was half way through that I suddenly realised this was a true story. I was really looking forward to when Arthur and George meet and how their joint lives interact. Unfortunately it was all a bit of a let down. In a fictionalised account, it might have made an exciting ending, but not in real life.

Overall, I found the whole thing a bit overblown. Whilst Julian Barnes is a first class novelist, he could have done with cutting out at least a hundred pages, especially all the nonsense about Arthur's obsession with spiritualism. The brevity of his "Metroland" and "The Sense of an Ending" shows he can do it. Then it might have made an excellent book.

The Sense of an Ending
I hardly ever read a book twice. But having previously read my second Julian Barnes novel "Metroland", I knew I had to return to this even shorter novel. It felt it was an even better read than first time round in 2012. I'm not much older than our retired narrator Tony and there are many similarities with my character. He thinks he has had a peaceably good life (maybe not altogether a good thing) if not peaceable, has "some instinct for survival, for self preservation" (been there). But I don't agree with the last two paragraphs (poignant and brilliant as they may be) which sum up his present state of mind ... "towards the end of life ....the end of any likelihood of change in that life". I was older than Tony when I took up running, and that my friends is a massive change.  Yes, the book is about time and memory, and when our narrator says "time doesn't act as a fixative, rather as a solvent" I know what he means. And I know I will read this book again in a few years time.

My review for 2012 said: You wonder how such a short novel could win The Man Booker Prize, but Julian Barnes' The Sense of an Ending just shows how a brief story can be so good. Tony is looking back. He is retired (yes, OK, I am too) and is ruminating about Adrian, who he first met at school, and what happened to him. I did start off wondering why "The" Sense of an Ending and not "A". But in the end I did found out why. The writing is just sublime. Tony asks a lot of questions of the reader. We do not have to necessarily agree, but they do make you think, and not in a highbrow philosophical way, but just about life. The book is also about memory, and how it is imperfect or distorted, especially as you grow older. But more than anything, the book transports you to a sort of semi-comfortable reflection of the past. I'm just not sure if, like Tony, you have to be retired.