The Sense of an Ending is a 2011 novel by Julian Barnes, winner of the Booker Prize for that year.

Tony Webster looks back at his life from retirement age. He remembers school days, preparing for final exams, a clever boy in a tight group with two other similarly able boys. Then Adrian, a step up in clever, joins their gang, giving nonchalantly impressive answers to questions that their history teacher poses – questions like ‘what is history?’

Tony leaves school. The account of the rest of his life could be seen as a meditation on memory and history. History is ‘the lies of the victors’ says school boy Tony in class. His teacher reminds him that is also the ‘self-delusions of the defeated’. Is Tony one of life’s victors? He’s done pretty well, survived long enough to write the story down. But evidence emerges that he could actually be one of the deluded defeated.

So you can ponder along these lines. But before you start thinking this book is just for seminars and essays, I would point out it’s also a good read that carries you along. There is more than a suggestion that history also carries you along, doing what it does, caring nothing for efforts to understand or shape it. Going back to the school scenes, one particular lad who didn’t merit membership of the History Boys’ gang, was asked to characterise life during the reign of Henry VIII. He suggests that the word ‘conflict’ would sum it up. When pressed for further details, he tries, ‘much conflict’. These wise words actually end the book. This unknown boy, a most minor of characters, turns out to have the final say. Maybe life’s winners and losers share the same ambivalent history in the end.

Evelyn Waugh’s Decline and Fall tells the story of Paul Pennyfeather, who we first meet as a blameless undergraduate studying theology in 1920s Oxford. At school he had edited the magazine, been President of the Debating Society, and ‘exercised a wholesome influence for good’ according to his report. Now at Oxford, on the night of the infamous Bollinger Club dinner, he is returning to his college room after listening to an interesting talk on plebiscites in Poland, intending to read a chapter or two of the Forsyth Saga before going bed. Unfortunately, the old school tie he is wearing happens to be similar to that of the rampaging Club. The tie attracts the attention of a drunken Bollinger, who strips Paul of his trousers. Rather than upset the wealthy and well connected attacker, the college authorities choose to blame the incident on humble Paul, accuse him of indecent behaviour, and expel him from the university.

This incident sets the tone of Decline and Fall, where there are laughs, but also reflections on fate and morality if you want that sort of thing. Fortune is a capricious mistress, favouring and condemning with fickle abandon. Following his expulsion, Paul goes to work at a North Wales public school, does quite well, and falls in love with Margot Best-Chetwynde, an immensely wealthy and beautiful windowed mother of one of the pupils. When Margot agrees to marry him, fortune seems to smile on Paul. Actually, no. Margot Best-Chetwynde, apart from having a drug problem, is also in the business of running ‘entertainment clubs’ in Latin America. On the day before the wedding, Margot asks Paul to go to Marseille to smooth out an apparent misunderstanding involving a group of girls en-route to one of her establishments. Paul doesn’t realise that he has been given the job of bribing local police to turn a blind eye to people trafficking. He is arrested, charged and sent to prison.

Paul falls foul of his sense of honour, which prevents him speaking up about Margot, or the Bollinger boy. Because he is good, he is punished, while those with no scruples do well. But Paul is not down and out for too long. Good things sometimes happen to him. The book is called Decline and Fall, but Paul is on a journey of ups as well as downs, maybe even cancelling themselves out into kind of a steady state.

And talking of honourable people, what do we think of the person who wrote this book? He does write some uncomfortable scenes, such as the ones involving Margot’s boyfriend, Chokey. And be warned if you are Welsh, because this author seems to have unpleasant preconceptions about you. But then as soon as I was inclined to get judgy, the wider theme of the novel came along to make me reflect on the shaky basis of judgy-ness. Good qualities can have bad outcomes and vice versa. Decline and Fall suggests that no one is a paragon of virtue in this complicated world, authors included.

Funny, interesting, subtle, unwholesome, ridiculous, philosophical. Well worth reading.