What I Read -- The Sense of an Ending

I really liked The Sense of an Ending. As one might guess from the title, it is a melancholy tale.

It is a story told by a man looking back on certain aspects of his life, and realizing that he wasn't quite the person he thought he was when he was younger, and in the middle of the experiences he is now recounting.  He talks at some length about remorse:

"And no, it wasn't shame I now felt, or guilt, but something rarer in my life and stronger than both: remorse.  A feeling which is more complicated, curdled and primeval.  Whose chief characteristic is that nothing can be done about it: too much time has passed, too much damage has been done, for amends to be made."

And then later:

"I was saying, confidently, how the chief characteristic of remorse is that nothing can be done about it: that the time has passed for apology or amends.  But what if I'm wrong?  What if by some means remorse can be made to flow backwards, can be transmuted into simple guilt, then apologised for, and then forgiven?"

As you can see from this pair of quotes, this book has one of my favorite things in it: an uncertain or unreliable narrator.  Despite that, his insights into his own character, and all of ours more generally, are spot on and well said.  I wonder whether this concept would have turned into quite such a wonderful book in the hands of a younger author.  Julian Barnes was 65 when this was released, which puts him at about the age of the main character.  Would a 30-year-old been able to get quite as good a grip on the retrospective?  I'm not sure.