Sixty-something Tony Webster, the narrator, looks back on his schooldays, his first relationship at university, an ensuing love triangle and the subsequent suicide of his brilliant friend Adrian. The youthful decisions of the protagonist come back to haunt him some 40 years later, when he is mysteriously left Adrian’s diary in a will.The book is divided into two halves, an extended flash-back which must then be reconsidered in the light of the older Tony’s musings on the past. Things, needless to say, are not as they seemed – and Tony can’t even be sure of how they seemed, anymore. Because the past can never be fully recollected, and memory is unreliable, and thank me later, because I’ve just saved you the two or so odd hours you might otherwise have wasted reading this.

Barnes plumps for the cerebral at the expense of the emotionally engaging. His title is taken from a work of literary criticism by Frank Kermode, which deals with the way that plot twists – the peripeteia of Greek tragedy – force the reader to re-evaluate a narrative. And Barnes seems to think that this kind of reference – Flaubert gets a nod or two as well – entitles him to have a character who constantly spouts platitudes: “what you end up remembering isn’t always the same as what you have witnessed”. Deep.

Barnes could have done with considering how much agonized self-interrogation a reader can take from his beige-tinted protagonist. I got the sense that I am not this novel’s target audience, being under fifty, female, and uninterested in interpreting my entire existence through the context of one university relationship. “Did you leave because of me?”, Tony asks his ex-wife over lunch, “No”, she says, “I left because of us”. Queue a paragraph break in which to marvel at the insight. At times, this seems to be the point – that the author is satirizing his character’s Flaubertian desire to live life his a novel despite his overwhelming blandness: “when you’re young – when I was young – you want your emotions to be like the ones you read about in books...”. But – as with his insistence on the unreliability of memory, and, hence, of his own narration – Barnes labours the point too much. So when Tony insists, “let me stress that this is my reading now of what happened then. Or rather, my memory now of my reading then of what was happening at the time”, one wonders quite how stupid Barnes expects his readers to be.

The subjectivity of any first-person narrative and the difficulties of recollection are better left implied – some ‘show don’t tell’ would have been very welcome. Unless this is a heavily ironic comment on the foibles of contemporary ‘literary fiction’, so entranced by his own ‘literariness’ that it forgets to actually be worth reading, it is yet another spectacularly unimpressive instance of that sad species. Dame Stella Rimington, chair of the Booker judging panel, called this ‘a book that spoke to humankind in the 21st century’. But that’s absolute codswallop. Unless humankind is now defined by having a ‘failed relationship’ at university and spending the rest of one’s life pondering the mediocrity of things.

In the form of a distinctly mediocre novel. Had this not won the Booker Prize a few days ago, my response would have been exactly that of the protagonist on meeting his ex-girlfriend for the first time in forty years, “I felt not very much”. Slight irritation, lingering disappointment, and ultimately indifference would have prevailed.

Barnes’s novel makes me fume with resentment of the literary establishment – can this really be what currently passes for excellence? The book has been praised for its concision – but honestly, if it had been any longer I would have thrown it down in disgust and googled a plot summary. Tony describes his life as “an ordinary, sad story – all too familiar – and simply told” – which seems to me a pretty good summary of The Sense of an Ending. Put simply, this is no Wolf Hall.