It’s true that if Tony hadn’t written the letter, perhaps Adrian would not have killed himself. I have to say, I think it’s a bit of a stretch to see Tony as responsible for Adrian’s death. As Tony says, “I looked at the chain of responsibility. The suggestion, then, is that Adrian’s suicide wasn’t an intellectual/philosophical decision after all, but a banal one on the same level as Robson’s suicide in their school days. Tony feels guilty because his spiteful letter drove Adrian to Veronica’s mother, which led them to produce a son, which led to his suicide. At least, I’m pretty sure it is, unless I’m like Tony and just don’t get it at all □ Perhaps you think you must have missed something, that a Booker-prize-winning novel must have something deeper to it than that. Now, I think perhaps the reason why people are confused is because this doesn’t seem like much of a revelation. The reason her mother had Adrian’s diary and said he had been happy in his last few months is because he had been with her. The reason Veronica kept saying throughout the book that Tony didn’t get it was because he never understood this link. So the big revelation is that Adrian had an affair with Veronica’s mother, and so the young Adrian is Veronica’s brother, not her son, as Tony had assumed.
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