Julian Barnes: a fan of 'English reticence'
Julian Barnes does not read his reviews. Which is a shame
because he's getting some very good ones for Arthur and George. His 10th
novel is based on the real-life whodunit that more than a century ago led
Arthur Conan Doyle to metaphorically don his most famous creation's deerstalker
and investigate. Peter Kemp in the Sunday Times wrote of it that "Barnes's
suave, elegant prose - alive here with precision, irony and humaneness - has
never been used better in this extraordinary true-life tale, which is as
terrifically told as any by its hero Conan Doyle himself". Tim Adams in
the Observer, too, reckoned that Barnes had "taken the bones of a
long-dead history and imbued them with vivid and memorable life".
No matter: Barnes will not be tempted. "When I started off I would read
everything obsessively," he says over coffee at a pub near his north
"When my first novel Metroland [1980] was
published it would be reviewed with Melvyn Bragg's new novel. One would say
'Next to Bragg's symphonic new book, this batsqueak
of autobiography bears little scrutiny'. The next would say 'Besides Bragg's
monument of windbaggery, this tightly constructed ...
"
Surely it's not the irritating spread of opinions that hurts - just the
hostile ones? "I don't get any better at reading bad reviews. So seven or
eight years ago I stopped." That was around the time that
Was it
Do you have a thin skin? "I'm not as bad as Philip Roth. He leaves the
country when a book comes out." Indeed, for publication, Barnes has
returned to this country with his wife, literary agent Pat Kavanagh,
from a walking holiday in France, his spiritual if not actual second home. He
may not read the reviews, but he has a code ready for interpreting the Barnesian brouhaha in the papers: "They'll tell me: 'X
can come for tea. Or Y will not be welcome for tea.' I get the picture that
way." What a fuss! Maybe the 59-year-old, one of
Unwittingly, I put something in Barnes's head that festers during the
interview. I suggest that Suzanne Dean's charming retro jacket design for
Arthur and George, a dark mustard cloth binding embossed with a Punch-like
illustration of the two protagonists, is Edward-ian
whimsy, of a piece with the style of a book that echoes the stateliness of
certain Edward-ian novels, notably Conan Doyle's.
Mildly affronted, Barnes repeats "whimsy" several times during the
rest of the interview.
The more I think about it, the righter Barnes is to be affronted. Arthur
and George is better than whimsy: it's a compelling, elegant if middle-brow return
to form that is already being talked up as a possible Booker winner, in a year
when Barnes is likely to go toe to toe once more with Ian McEwan,
whose novel Amsterdam beat Barnes's shortlisted England, England to the Booker
prize in 1998. Barnes has never won the Booker, though Flaubert's Parrot was
shortlisted in 1984. This year, he and McEwan may
well be shortlisted along with Ishiguro, Rushdie, Coetzee and Zadie Smith.
Barnes, on being told that the Sunday Times is suggesting that these big
boys (Smith excepted) of undead EngLit are poised to
carve up the Booker between them, says the idea is "ridiculous. It's just
the way books get talked about. It just so happens that Ish,
Ian, Salman and I have books out at the same
time."
What of his old friend Martin Amis, the other big boy writer of that
generation, one with whom he had been friendly during their days on the New
Statesman and afterwards? It was, according to Amis's memoir Experience, on
January 12 1995 that Barnes wrote a letter to his friend including a phrase
that "consists of two words. The words consist of seven letters. Three of
them are fs." That letter had been in response
to Amis breaking with Kavanagh, his English agent of
23 years. Amis wrote back saying, among other things: "I will call you in
a while - quite a long while." It's been 10 years - has Amis redeemed his
pledge? "Va te perdre," [Get lost] says Barnes, with a steely look
that suggests if there is a hatchet to be buried it will be in my head.
Moving on. Why did you write a book about the least interesting of eminent
Edwardian writers? Why not about Ford, Wells, James, Kipling, Conrad or Shaw?
"Because he came with the story." And it was the story of George Edjali, a
The book, despite its many meditations on a long-dead literary icon, is no
Flaubert's Parrot. It could have been called Conan Doyle's Hobby Horse, though
that was not one of the 30 to 40 titles that Barnes considered for the book.
"One suggestion was Conviction." That's very good. "Yes, but it
was too much like Atonement. Then there was News from Distant Lands, which was
too much like a Jonathan Raban travel book. In the
end, I went with the working title, which other people seemed to like but I
hadn't."
It was the great (and, since April, late) historian of France, Douglas
Johnson, who suggested to Barnes that the Great Wyrley
Outrage was the British parallel to the Dreyfus Affair, a miscarriage of
justice in the heart of England that equally pointed up the nature of an
imperial society shuddering into a new century. Racism, fears of miscegenation,
imputations of sexual dysfunction, an establishment cover-up, suspicious
footprints - the story had everything.
It even had its Emile Zola - Conan Doyle - who, after nosing around Staffordshire,
wrote a pamphlet that accused the constabulary of convicting the wrong man. It
wasn't Edjali, the son of a church of England vicar,
who was responsible for the fatal slashings of
livestock, he claimed, but some ne'er-do-well from
"I think both cases say something about their different
countries," says Barnes. "It shows the way that the French are
actively engaged with their own history. In
You're analysing jolly old
And
Throughout, there is something cherishable about
Conan Doyle's Blimpishness and his chivalry towards
women, even if his sexual chasteness is, frankly, weird. "There is a tradition
of English emotional reticence which can easily fall away into emotional
inexpressiveness and frigidity," says Barnes. "I prefer that to the Oprahfication of the emotions which is what has happened.
People talking about their emotional lives in staggering detail on
The book unfolds with alternating narratives juxtaposing the eponymous
characters' developments. George is raised in a C of E vicarage; Arthur by a
Catholic mother in shabby-genteel
Most intriguingly, Arthur is a one-time eye doctor who hopes to correct a
misperception (ie, the case against George), while
George is chronically short-sighted though capable of great insights. In one of
the novel's great scenes, George wanders near the Albert Memorial and imagines.
"And in that moment, George was struck by the realisation
that everybody was going to be dead." George's imaginative insight spreads
across the park like a neutron bomb, wiping out everybody. And yet again Barnes
has broached one of his favourite literary subjects,
death.
Throughout the book, how one moves from what little one actually sees to
what one infers from it, how characters construct vast, teetering structures -
from the Staffordshire constabulary's flimsy case against Edjali
to the equally implausible rival case that Conan Doyle assembles to indict the
The book also deals with Conan Doyle's spiritualism, itself a close
absence. At one point, during a seance for the dead
writer in the Albert Hall, George looks through his binoculars from the balcony
to the stage where a chair has been left for Conan Doyle. Will George's feeble
eyes ever behold the dead writer's spirit that has reportedly been trying to
communicate with the throng? It seems unlikely.
What are the links between these ocular themes and the detective story you
are telling? "It's about what you can prove, not just in the criminal
sense but the emotional sense," says Barnes. He suggests that the will to
believe is often more important than what one actually sees.
Was he ever a Conan Doyle fan? "I read the Sherlock Holmes stories
when I was a child. But I am not anything like him. I am not going to put a
deerstalker on. Or grow a walrus moustache." Nor is Barnes a man of
action, like Conan Doyle who, in Arthur and George, is forever doing - skiing
Alpine passes, doctoring during the Boer war, clubbing seals in Greenland,
clubbing golf balls in
Though Conan Doyle can never replace Flaubert as Barnes's literary hero,
there is a parallel between them. Barnes created a sleuth, too. Under the
pseudonym Dan Kavanagh, he wrote four novels in the
80s about a bisexual sleuth called Duffy. He did not prove as popular as
Sherlock Holmes. When Holmes plunged to his death at the
Barnes denies this. "I deliberately didn't want to write a book that
bounces off his work." A cunningly forensic mind is none the less behind
Arthur and George. No wonder that after
That said, Barnes cannot imagine being a campaigning writer as Conan Doyle
became, bothering the establishment with his passionately held views. "I'm
not a public platform person either by my own personal temperament or my
literary temperament. I don't write novels in order to persuade people of
things." Why then do you write novels? "Oh what a G2 question. I
can't answer that in a soundbite. I'll give you a
reply in 3,000 words in a few weeks."
I'm not sure if he's joking. If, Mr Barnes you
are reading this, and you were serious, please send me your reply soonest so we
can run it in the paper. That, though, will probably not happen - if you don't
read reviews, what chance is there you'll read this?
· Arthur and George is published by
©Guardian News and Media Limited 2008
URL: http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2005/jul/06/fiction.julianbarnes
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