Exposed as a FRAUD!

Now, you know that feeling - Oh Bliss, oh Joy! - when you hand in your boarding pass and they scan it and then, instead of going "Ding" and you walk through to the misery of a middle seat in the economy section, it goes "Boing" and a red light shows? The uniformed cabin attendant pauses, looks at a screen and then - (Choirs of angels sing overhead) she writes a new seat on your boarding card in the Business Class section? Do you know that feeling? If you have never had it, it is hard to explain. The world instantly seems alright. Clouds part. Music plays. Your step is light.

But the real Business Class people are all a bit suspicious. They can spot you a mile off. At the sound of the "Boing", their eyes find you. They stare disdainfully at you. You are an imposter in their ranks! You show your boarding pass at the entrance of the aircraft, like everyone else. But the cabin crew see the changed seat number. They try to act suitably deferential, but they have seen the red writing. So they know you are not really a Business Class flyer.

Be that as it may, you are now counted amongst the favoured few. You settle down in your extra wide, extra comfy seat. You try to behave as nonchalantly as you possibly can as expensive bottles of wine are proffered in your general direction. You are asked to taste the contents before pouring a full glass in a real wineglass. Ah! What a wonderful life it is.

Then you hear the menu being offered to the Business Class seats in front of you. Glazed Greek leg of lamb with a vegetable side and a Greek salad? Or perhaps a succulent creamy Chicken dish served on brown rice? You think, maybe the lamb. Maybe you will settle for the lamb. And what a joy it will be to eat off white china, with real knives and forks and a cloth table napkin.

She gets to you - and suddenly, there you are, staring at a red plastic tray, with a plastic knife and fork set! There must be some mistake! Why has this happened? And then you remember. You had pre-ordered a "special" low fat meal, with your economy class ticket. And there it is! It had found you, even in the Business Class! The businessman in the next seat in the grey suit glances over at your red plastic tray with a sneer of disapproval. You are unmasked as the fraud and and imposter that you are. And how sad you feel about missing the lamb!

Book Review: The Sense of an Ending - Julian Barnes

The Sense of an Ending
Julian Barnes
Alfred a Knopf, 2011


Julian Barnes’ fourteenth book, The Sense of an Ending, is the recent winner of the 2011 Man Booker Prize. It has been described as a novel for grown-ups. The simplest and most straightforward of stories on the surface, but of a kind which turns back on itself and forces you to reflect on your own behaviour and your own life.

The writing is light, often funny and always graceful and observant. And this latter point is the real issue. While acute observation of others is the essence of the story, the narrator (Tony Wheeler) spectacularly fails to notice his own lack of insight.

And it is not that he is dishonest about himself. Part of the real charm of the narrator is that he can be intensely insightful about his own failings and flaws - and especially about his own insecurities. But he has missed the key point about his first and most serious relationship, with the enigmatic and tempestuous Veronica Ford. He cannot understand, (Veronica says to him on more than one occasion). He never did, she tells him, and he never will. Tony and Veronica break up eventually – however, as he observes: “the first experience of love, even if it doesn’t work out - perhaps especially when it doesn’t work out - promises that here is the thing that validates, that vindicates life.”

Tony is now 60 years old, and circumstances mean that he has needed to reflect deeply on his life. As a bright teenager, with bright friends, he was happy enough. The friends become students - “book-hungry, sex-hungry, meritocratic, anarchistic”. They were “pretentious - what else is youth for?” One amongst them, the deepest thinker and perhaps the most troubled, Adrian Finn, is the one who is, in a shadowy way, the friend who remains most connected to him and intertwined with his life. Tony often recalls the depths and complexity of Adrian’s responses to both situations and questions. Adrian kills himself, and this is the catalysts for the serious introspection in the narrator.

Tony wants (and has achieved) a quiet, and fairly untroubled life. While he might admire from a distance the tortured philosophical path of his friend, he did not covet it. He ends up marrying Margaret, a stable, ordinary, caring woman. They had a child and eventually separated, not because of any particular conflict, but because the relationship just became unnecessary.

And now, at this age, the death of his friend and the bequest of his diary to him, by Veronica’s mother, has meant that he has needed to re-examine the things that he remembers and match them to the things that actually happened. “[W]hat you end up remembering isn’t always the same as what you have witnessed,” he concludes. Such are the vagaries of age and the passage of time.

He meets up with Veronica again. It takes the form of something quite close to a courtship, but all the old fixtures of their failed relationship are present, standing in the wings. He tells Veronica about his life. She tells him nothing of hers. He makes conclusions - many conclusions about her, which are all hopelessly short of the mark. When, finally, the truth becomes clear to him, he realizes his own manipulation of circumstance, history and memory.

The book is good reading. You need to understand the culture of British male reserve coupled with a concomitant sense of assumption. But if you do, it is a book that will really entrance you. And indeed, it may make you seriously consider yourself and your own re-making of history. We all do it, after all.