The inscrutable Mr
Barnes
Last Updated: 12:01am BST 23/09/2006
Julian Barnes's
bestselling novel 'Arthur and George' is his 20th book - but what do we know
about the man who wrote it? He talks to Jasper Rees
Of the golden generation of
British novelists now within hailing distance of old age,
Julian Barnes is much the hardest to pin down. Martin Amis, Salman Rushdie, Ian McEwan –
you know where you are with them, and have done for years.But
the unifying theme of Barnes's work? The through line? If there is such a
thing, it's an elegant unknowability, a distaste for the business of sifting through the
contents of his own navel. The one time I met Auberon Waugh, the founder of Literary Review, he was
arguing that no one would be reading Barnes in 20 years' time. This would
have been about 20 years ago. Waugh had recently set up his literary magazine
as a sort of critical sea-wall, its task to hold back the tide of postmodernism,
experimentalism, clever-clever obfuscation and general dicking
around with form. Perhaps Waugh was just trying to wish Barnes into
obscurity. He was best known at that point for Metroland,
a debut that loitered in suburbia and didn't frighten the horses, followed by
Flaubert's Parrot, which did. Published in 1984, that novel
now seems a very Barnesian admonition to literary
enthusiasts that the hunt for biographical trivia is a wild goose chase. It
is certainly the closest he has come to a mission statement and, if its
author hasn't exactly been languishing in the shadows, for the next 20 years
it looked more and more likely to be the book for which he would be
principally remembered. Then last year came Arthur &
George, which has reached more readers in hardback than any of its 19
predecessors (11 fiction, four whodunits under the
nom de plume of Dan Kavanagh, three non-fiction,
one translation of Daudet). The story behind the creation of
the Court of Appeal might not sound too gripping a pitch to a |
"It's the novel I wrote most intensely in
terms of hours per day," Barnes allows. "And it drove me along in a
way that I then wanted to drive the reader along. It sounds a bit glib to say I
wrote it in order to have something to read on the subject, but there's
something a bit like that going on."
The subject is a miscarriage of justice. George
Edalji, a blameless solicitor of Parsee origin, was
found guilty in 1903 of a series of brutal attacks on horses in
It was the only time Conan Doyle responded to
such a cry for help, but, a century on, Edalji's
story has been forgotten anew. If Arthur rescued George from obloquy, it is
Julian who has rescued him from obscurity. Barnes being Barnes, the original
seed for Arthur & George was, of course, French.
"I was reading about the Dreyfus
case," he says. Specifically, he was reading Douglas Johnson's France and
the Dreyfus Affair on the points of similarity between the infamous conviction
for espionage of a Jewish officer in the French army and the contemporaneous
victimisation of the young Anglo-Indian. Both cases put a nation's attitude to
its own minorities on trial.
More than that, says Barnes, "in both
cases there is a shocking crime, a miscarriage of justice, key handwriting
evidence, a sentence of hard labour, and a famous writer rides to the rescue.
Why has one case been forgotten and why is the Dreyfus case resonating
throughout
To begin with, Barnes didn't have "any
particular interest in Conan Doyle. I deliberately didn't re-read the canon in
order to write this book because I didn't want it to be that sort of
book." When his interest was pricked, it was by Conan Doyle's modish
espousal of spiritualism, and by his long courtship of Jean Leckie
while his invalided first wife was still alive.
"In his autobiography he completely lies
about Jean, and early biographers completely cover it up. The spiritualist
stuff is also about evidence, proof, knowledge, belief. And you think, this is
the point at which it starts to become potentially a novel." He started to
fill the gaps between the facts with fiction.
We meet in a pub near Barnes's home in north
It's hard to square this image of a sports nerd
with what we know of the writer. But then, what do we know of the writer? It
was about halfway through Metroland, which took an
unconscionable time to complete, that Barnes says he "learnt how to
invent". The self-portrait glimpsed in the first half of the book is like
a rare snap of Pynchon or Salinger. Ever since, Barnes has kept himself well
out of it. Was that him being retroactively jealous of his wife in Before She
Met Me? In Talking It Over and its sequel, Love Etc, his two novels about the
trials and triangulations of love, would he be the plodding money-maker Stuart
or the mercurial flop Ollie?
"None of those characters is
based on anyone," he says. "Even writers say that fiction is the
higher autobiography, and I don't buy that at all. I think that what most of us
do is more complicated. Everyone thinks, 'I had a difficult childhood, then I grew
up, and then I had lots of affairs, and then some resolution happened to my
life: that's a novel.' Oh no it isn't. It wouldn't even be a very good
autobiography. It sort of vaguely irritates me."
Can we at least assume that The Lemon Table,
his recent collection of beautifully elegiac short stories, suggests a personal
preoccupation with getting on a bit? (Barnes is now 60.) "No, I'm sorry.
I'll swat that one down easily: (a) it took me about 10 years to write those
stories, so I was writing them from my mid-forties or so; (b) I always had my
eye on the thought that it gets worse, rather than better. It wasn't as if I
turned 50 or was approaching 60 and suddenly looked over the brow of the hill
and thought, oh, I don't like the look of it there."
From where Barnes sits, even when he's not on
one of his frequent walking holidays (latest stop:
And the good news is that the press can even
stop bothering him about his spat with Martin Amis, recently spotted at the
launch party for the paperback edition of Arthur & George. As usual Barnes
keeps his trap politely shut when this comes up, save for a question.
"Have you heard about *********'s love-child?" And he names a famous
writer knight. Which I take to be Barnesian for
"mind your own business".
Not all good news is real news. A few weeks
ago, it was reported that Harvey Weinstein had bought the rights to Arthur
& George for a seven-figure sum.
"I was in the States for my book tour at
the time and I got home and I rang up a friend who said, 'Oh Jules, I heard
you're going to be very rich.' I said, 'That's very odd, I haven't heard
anything about this.'" It turned out that someone somewhere had confused
Arthur & George with a French film called Artur.
In which there is a certain piquant irony.
The last time a novel of his was filmed, it was
Talking It Over and it was transplanted to
Barnes hasn't finished his Trappist
beer, but the cricket highlights beckon. As a parting shot, I ask him how he'd
react if someone did to him what he's done to Conan Doyle and Flaubert – if
someone wrote a history of Julian Barnes in 10½ chapters? "Oh I'd be very
cross," he says. But what about when he's gone? "I don't care what
happens after I'm dead. I assume it's even worse than old age."
Not for George Edalji,
who died in Welwyn Garden City at the age of
"At one point Maud took her to the back of
the house and opened a door and said, 'This is my brother George.' And there
was a man sitting at a desk who looked up and bowed, and then she closed the
door." Barnes has opened the door again, and given him an afterlife.
© Telegraph Media Group Limited
2008
URL: http://www.telegraph.co.uk/arts/main.jhtml?xml=/arts/2006/09/23/bobarnes23.xml&page=1
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Creada: 28/10/2008 Última Actualización: 28/10/2008
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