London – For an outspoken defender of a writer’s right to privacy, Julian Barnes has a striking yen for literary curios. Strolling around his north London home, the 59-year-
old novelist picks up one signed photograph after the other – Turgenev, Kipling, Borges – handing them over with the excitement of a true fan. “Who do you think this is?” Barnes asks, presenting an antique postcard of a man in short pants. He gives me a few tries, and then flips the card over to reveal its provenance. It turns out to be a gag photo of T.S. Eliot, which the poet made into a photograph and sent to a friend. Apparently Mr. Prufrock’s creator had a sense of humor about himself.
As does Barnes, for he hasn’t just turned this obsession toward collecting: He has made it one of his great literary subjects. Barnes’ 1984 Booker finalist “Flaubert’s Parrot” told the story of an English doctor attempting to track down a stuffed bird that once sat on the desk of Gustave Flaubert. His latest, “Arthur & George” (Knopf, 400 pages, $24.95) also a Booker finalist, resurrects beloved detective novelist Arthur Conan Doyle. It would seem the British novelist hasn’t entirely banished literary history from his pages.
“Conan Doyle is a very different character,” says Barnes later, sitting in his large library before a very tiny television, legs crossed, his face a picture of intellectual pique. “Flaubert had very strong opinions about journalistic prurience – he used to go into tirades about it – but Doyle was a famous man and a public figure. He was the sort of writer who was used to being in the open.”
With this justification dispatched, Barnes felt free to imagine his way into the inner life of Britain’s most beloved detective novelist. The action unfolds with Arthur at the peak of his career, but the nadir of his personal life. His interest in his work has waned, his wife has fallen ill, and Arthur is desperately in love with a much younger woman. In need of a cause larger than himself, Arthur redirects his energies to the real-life case of George Edalji, a part-Indian solicitor from Birmingham who was railroaded in 1903 for mutilating farm animals, a crime he did not commit.
Although Doyle is clearly the headliner here, it is George who steals the show. The son of a vicar in a rural English parish, he grew up fast, thanks to a series of anonymous letters to his family spewing racist epithets and threatening violence. But nothing comes of this disturbing episode. As George enters college age, he discovers a love for the liturgical rhythms of legal language and decides to become a solicitor. Like Arthur, George experiences his own career-making publishing coup: a pamphlet called “Railway Law for the Man in the Train.”
“I came across (George Edalji) reading about the Dreyfus affair,” says Barnes, legs crossed, three walls of books giving the comment a studious gravitas. “Once I found out that Doyle began investigating George’s plight at the same time he fell in love with a woman who wasn’t his wife, that’s when I knew there was a story there.”
Barnes began his writing career as a lexicographer, before moving on to work on the books page of a newspaper and then as a television critic. The whiff of a journalist chasing a story travels in the wake of his discussion, in part because Barnes speaks of fiction writing without the slightest trace of quasi-spiritual mumbo jumbo one occasionally hears. Even the plight of Edalji couldn’t shake this professional resolve. “Sure, it was upsetting,” he says, “but as a novelist when you are trying to set up this machine, this narrative, you hope to ratchet up the reader’s sense of injustice – even if you know in the end it will be somewhat unresolved.”
This is not to say Barnes or his work is cold but rather that he is utterly in control of what he does, a feat all the more remarkable given how many registers he has played in the past. In addition to “Flaubert’s Parrot,” he has also turned out two thrashingly good novels about the blood sport of marriage (“Talking It Over,” and “Love, Etc.”); a plangent collection of short stories about the pain of getting old (“The Lemon Table”); a book of essays on the pleasures of cooking (“The Pedant in the Kitchen”); and two compendiums of journalism about life in London and in Paris. During the 1980s he also wrote a series of crime novels under the pseudonym Dan Kavanagh.
If there is one thing Barnes won’t be adding to this list it’s a historical novel. Although “Arthur & George” is set in the past, Barnes does not think it should be shelved next to James Michener. “I didn’t want to write an entire book in Edwardian prose. It becomes a bit like repro furniture.” So he read Doyle’s autobiography, talked to detectives and researched the Edalji case. He discovered papers other historians had overlooked and even found a detective who had spent his entire life collecting ephemera on the case. “He was convinced George had done it,” Barnes says incredulously.
Some things apparently do not change. Or as Barnes says, “We’re not that different are we?” I ask him if cases like George’s still happen, and he says, yes, all too frequently. “For instance there was that case in England eight or nine years ago back where an Englishmen of West Indian origins was found hanging from his belt from the park gates,” Barnes pauses to let this image sink in. “And the police didn’t turn anything up.
“His nephew started asking questions, and not long after was found hanging from his belt from the park gates too. The police merely remarked on how unusual it was that they used the same method to kill themselves. It takes a great shaming case to change things usually, and for a while, it gets better.”
John Freeman lives in New York.
