I published The Sense of an Ending in 2011, when I was 65. My previous novel had come out six years before, and was the longest I had written. This was to be my shortest. Various things change you as a person and a writer as you age. You think more about time and memory; about what time does to memory, and memory does to time. You also mistrust memory more than when you were younger: you realise that it resembles an act of the imagination rather than a matter of simple mental recuperation.
And when it comes to writing, two things may happen, and with luck do. The first is you have a greater confidence in your ability to move through time. The great exemplar here is Alice Munro – you can read a story of hers, 30 pages or so, and realise that, almost without your noticing, a character’s whole lifetime seems to have passed. How did she do that, you wonder? So in my novel, there is an opening section of about 50 pages, then a gap of 40 years, and then a hundred pages more. I wouldn’t have risked that in younger years.
The second thing is a realisation – shared with other artists – that you don’t have to put everything in. There are painters who in old age allow the canvas or the wood to show through their markings. Verdi, in his later years, scored more sparingly; as he put it “I learned when not to write notes.” And I think I learned when not to put in those unnecessary sentences. It’s not a loss of physical energy (though that is also unignorable), more a recognition that you can often do more by saying less. While at the same time inviting the reader to fill in the gaps.
When I finish a novel, I usually forget its origins, processes and pains: they are no use to me now. I know that early on, I wrote down the name of a friend I’d been close to at school and then lost touch with; only to discover, when I was around 50, that he had killed himself a quarter of a century previously. It was not the death itself but that long, eerie unknowingness that played into a central strand of the novel. I also knew that I wanted the novel to be at the same time meditative and a psychological drama. Two modes, just as it would have two speeds: in the first section, the pace, or anti-pace, of memory, while the longer second section would move in “real” time.
What I do remember well was the problem with the title. I initially called it Unrest – the final word in the novel. A friend worried that if you went into Waterstones and asked: “Have you got Unrest?” it might sound like an inquiry into the shop’s industrial relations. That killed it for me. Eventually, I came up with The Sense of an Ending. I tried it out on friends. Most liked it, but one pointed out that there was a classic work of literary criticism by Frank Kermode with the same title. I hadn’t heard of it, let alone read it (and still haven’t). I thought, a little cavalierly: “Well, there’s no copyright in titles, he’s had it for nearly 50 years, it’s mine now.” When the reviews came out, several pointed out that my book was “in conversation” with Kermode’s, either working out his ideas, or perhaps providing an amical riposte. Intertextuality, you see. Aaaarrgggh. Well, that’s one lesson the book taught me, at least.