Julian and Arthur and George
Georgie Lewis, Powells.com
The usual Julian Barnes novel is a slim and elegant gem, containing provocative
and illuminating perspectives on the human condition. From the linguistically
playful, formally sophisticated Flaubert's
Parrot to the compelling meditation on obsessive jealousy in Before
She Met Me, to amusing cultural essays on France
and Britain and urbane
accounts of the vissitudes
of erotic love, Barnes's work refuses to be catagorized. However, no matter the
subject matter he displays a delightful dry wit, devastating intellingence, and
an innate sense for the human condition in all its permeatations. Perhaps Joyce
Carol Oates put it best when she said he has the imagination of a 'quintessential
humanist, of the pre-postmodern species.'
 In
his tenth novel, Arthur and
George, Barnes has taken us by suprise again, with his gorgeous, epic retelling
of a true story, that of the famous Arthur Conan Doyle and the largely forgotten
George Edalji. Conan Doyle was an imperialist, a Knight of the Realm, and the
creator of Sherlock Holmes. George Edalji was the son of a Parsee country vicar,
a solicitor, and author of the 1901 pamphlet, Railway Law for the "Man
in the Train." Their characters could not be more different—
Conan Doyle is robust, an effusive romantic, and fascinated with the emerging
cult of Spiritualism, while Edalji is modest, punctilious, pragmatic, and endearingly
earnest. When Edalji is accused of maiming livestock and sent to jail on the
scantest of evidence, there is a public outcry. He appeals to Conan Doyle
for help to correct this gross miscarriage of justice. The novel explores the
relationship between them and the relationships between Conan Doyle and the
women in his life, as well as focusing on the trial and the stifling, prejudiced
society within which they lived. As the Independent wrote, "The legal drama
at the book's heart is a showcase for Barnes's effortless-seeming literary powers.
It's like seeing Henry James turned loose on The Shawshank Redemption."
Many critics are hailing Arthur and George as Barnes's best work yet,
which is saying a lot. As the Times Literary Supplement wrote,
"Barnes's suave, elegant prose—alive here with precision, irony
and humaneness—has never been used better than in this extraordinary
true-life tale, which is as terrifically told as any by its hero Conan Doyle
himself."
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"Barnes's writing is, as usual, masterly.... Facts are interpreted, then reinterpreted; the bigoted speak convincingly; nothing turns out quite as expected; and even the book's coda delivers a final shock." Michael Dirda, The Washington Post
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Georgie: How do you go about recreating a character based on a real
one? This is probably the first time you have done this in a novel—is
that right?
Julian Barnes: In a novel, yes. I have used real people in short stories
before, and I've written Flaubert's
Parrot which has a real writer in it, although he's not a fictional character
in the book. So it was new, yes.
So, how you go about it: You read enough but not too much. That's to say, you
read one or two biographies, you read Conan Doyle's autobiography, and bits
and pieces. You need enough to get your imagination going but not enough to
clog the wheels. But it's difficult to write about a character as famous as
Conan Doyle because you don't need all of him, so it's a question of
constantly deciding which bits to chop off and leave behind.
Georgie: I was wondering if you did leave things out that you discovered
about him.
Barnes: You are constantly making decisions like that. For example,
he was a great imperialist and at a certain point he went to the South African
war. He goes on to write a multi-volume history of it, and is knighted for it.
As a fiction writer, do you need him to go to South Africa? If you were a biographer,
he would have to go there because he did. But then you think, "I'm
not a biographer. If I send him to South Africa there has got to be a purpose."
So things could go either way. And obviously, yes, there are chunks of his life
that you leave out.
Georgie: I would presume much more material was available about Doyle
than about... Edalji... [Georgie makes a terrible attempt at pronunciation
here and Mr. Barnes corrects her with a word that sounds like the beginning
of edelweiss, pronouncing it AY-del-ji].
Barnes: Parsee names are stressed on the first syllable. But even so,
it's a mouthful of consonants to follow, isn't it?
Georgie: It is! Actually I was doing a bit of research of Parsees after
reading this novel. I was surprised to learn that it is estimated there are
only 100,000 of them in the world.
Barnes: There are not very many, no. They were a favored race of the
British. That is one of the ironies of the book: he was persecuted for his color.
The Parsees were regarded as a pretty top quality sect in the British Empire.
They were the merchant class. Highly educated. And indeed in the late 19th century
there were two Parsee members of the British parliament. The first Indian cricket
team that came to Britain was a Parsee team, and they were looked upon, partly
because they were pale-skinned and partly because they were a mercantile and
lawyerly class, as sort of bridging the gap between the "dusky races"
and the white man. And so, in fact, George's father, Shapurji, would have been
welcomed into the Church of England as sort of new blood. And yet it redounded
on his son.
Georgie: I had read that the Parsee is an adherent of the Zoroastrian
religion.
Barnes: Yes, and also, you cannot become a Parsee. Even if you marry
one you don't become a Parsee, so their numbers are always diminishing. And
also, they have a problem with the vultures, which is almost semi-comic. Parsees
can't be burnt and they can't be put into the water when they die. They have
to be exposed on the tops of columns and their flesh picked off by vultures.
Which is a problem at the moment in India because all the vultures are dying
from the chemicals they have been using in the fields. So they have even been
using solar panels to try and rot the corpses on the tops of these towers. Oh,
dear—is this acceptable subject matter for Powells.com?
Georgie: Oh, absolutely. And most fascinating too. So you knew a lot
less about George as a person, but what did you know?
Barnes: He was more a predicament than a personality when I started.
He was a case; this was what happened to him. There was a little
character description of him in Conan Doyle's newspaper about the case, which
sort of contradicted descriptions of him from the provincial press articles
of the trial. I really had to create him from the ground up, as I had to do
with almost all the characters, except for Conan Doyle's mother whose life is
quite well documented, and to a certain extent his wives, although there was
work to be done there, as well.
Georgie: You have said that you fell upon this case after researching
the Dreyfus Affair which occurred in France just a few years earlier. It seems
from your novel that Britain was not quite as bitterly divided around the time
of Edalji's case, as France was during Dreyfus, although the matter of class
and religion was terrifically apparent. Britain just didn't seem quite the tinderbox
that France was. Am I correct in this? What similarity do you think George Edalji's
case had with the Dreyfus Affair?
Barnes: I think the Dreyfus case did identify a deep political divide
within France. It was about left and right, it was about Catholic versus Jewish
but also, Catholic against... against the absence of religion, the non-religion.
The idea of a non-religious state. It was also about treason, and it was about
the honor of the army. Partly it was about larger matters, and partly France
is a country much more likely to split and have violent conflicts at the political
level. Whereas Britain has always been rather more sleepy in its divisions,
I think. The British are quite good—and you can charge them with many
things, hypocrisy included—but they are rather good at forgetting. Something
was bad in the country and it sort of got fixed, and so we forget about it.
Whereas in France they like to keep old wounds open, so to speak, and they like
to remember the past in a way that the English certainly don't. The Scots, the
Irish and the Welsh will have longer memories because on the whole they were
not treated terribly well by the English.
Georgie: I have seen the same difference moving here from Australia
and witnessing the very short memory of American politics versus the longer
memory of Australian politics.
Barnes: I think it is partly to do with power. When you are the most
powerful country in the world, as Britain used to be, you tend to celebrate
only your power; you don't appreciate difference or otherness, you only see
it as inferiority. And you don't see your history as a moral, exploited, or
inferior power does. But I think America is a special case, as opposed to Britain,
in terms of having short-term memory.
Georgie: Yes, I think you are right. And on the subject of American
politics... It could be said that your book is very timely—the subject
being a miscarriage of justice involving a person who looks "different"
and who is accused of terrorism of a kind. I was just looking at a press release
from the US Department of Defense that said, to date, over 14,000 detainees have
been released from coalition detention facilities in Iraq, and yet Haliburton
subsidiary KBR has been handed yet another contract for $385 million to create more
detainment camps for suspected terrorists. At the risk of asking you to comment
on politics, do you think there are parallels?
Barnes: Yes, there is the thing in common in regards to racial profiling.
There is an assumption nowadays that if you are traveling on the London underground
and there is a guy of, say, Arab appearance with a large rucksack, possibly reading
a Koran, that you keep an eye on him. Now on the one hand you could say that
is good sense, but on the other hand it is racial profiling, and you
could find that the next wave of bombers could come from East Africa, or indeed
from Huddersfield, or wherever. And the fact remains, even if you look
at someone's passport, the guys who blew themselves up were all British, so
where do you start? And so yes, it certainly does have echoes to what is happening
nowadays. I can't claim remotely—even though I certainly have been asked
as I've been going around the States—that this was written as a post-9/11
novel or a post-7/7 (referring to the London bombings), though it couldn't possibly
be a 7/7 novel because my publication date was 7/7.
Georgie: Oh no! Like the poor author...
Barnes: Ah, yes, poor author, lost his publication party. That was the
least of the losses that day, I can assure you!
Georgie: Er, point taken. Actually, I was thinking of Incendiary,
another British novel that was written about a mythical London bombing whose
publication date was around that time.
Barnes: Yes. I did hear about that. It is also true that sometimes books
pick up resonance and energy from things that have happened subsequently. For
instance, the classic recent example being Philip Roth's The
Plot against America. When it came out everyone immediately started saying,
"Oh, this is an allegory of the Bush years and the Bush seizure of power,"
when in fact he didn't write it in that sense at all. He was, I know, staggered;
he thought it was a phenomenon, what had happened to the book. But you know,
that's fair enough, because lots of works of literature are subsequently reinterpreted
or reseen through other eyes. Shakespeare
describes a tyranny in a particular way and then the play can be interpreted
in Poland under Soviet domination and it has absolute one hundred percent resonance.
And you say to Shakespeare, "I hear you are writing about Poland in four
hundred years time," and he's going to say, "Of course I'm not!"
Georgie: I'm thinking of the Richard III film, set in a Fascist state.
Barnes: There was a great Polish critic called Jan Knott who wrote Shakespeare
Our Contemporary, which was all about reinterpreting the tragedies in contemporary
terms and was a very influential book at the time, in the sixties.
Georgie: Do you think artists have a responsibility to draw attention
to political causes?
Barnes: I think artists have a responsibility to be true to their art.
And the art will vary according to the artist. In some cases they are not made
to be political artists and in other cases they are, and I don't think you should
force anything into the wrong shape. My general view is that art is greater
than politics and that art includes politics, rather than vice versa. And that
art isn't at the service of politics; politics is instead a potential subject
for art.
I don't think that it's my job to tell people how to live or to give them neat
moralities or advice, or to necessarily rebuke the powers that be. It is my
job to describe life as it is and put that description into a particularly pleasing
form of a story. That's my job. But in the describing of life, there is inevitably,
if it's accurate, an implicit description of what's wrong with some of it. And
to that extent writers can end up being political, depending again on the circumstance
of society in which they live. You know—a simple description of a man
going shopping would be quite different if it was in a relatively free United
States in a large supermarket and he had enough money, or the same man could
be trying to buy the same stuff under a tyranny, with a collapsed economy in
Eastern Europe. The same scene would have a different political impact.
Georgie: Yes. I also think that some people can become so successful
with their art, and thus achieve a certain status, like Conan Doyle, or today
like Bob Geldof or Bono, who can then go on to use this success and status to
speak about political matters that mean something to them.
Barnes: I think one of the interesting things about Conan Doyle is
that he was a famous author at a time when famous authors had the ear of presidents
and prime ministers, as did Kipling,
Bernard Shaw, H.
G. Wells, people like that. Nowadays, and it is a melancholy truth, if you
asked the current British prime minister who he would prefer to have sitting
next to him at a press conference—Ian
McEwan or Bob Geldof—he would say, "Bob Geldof, thank you very
much!" I don't think it is that writers have lost their moral authority;
it is more in the way that politics and the media currently interact. Politicians
are canny enough to know where the votes lie. Ever since Harold Wilson gave
O.B.E.s to the Beatles and had them around to Number Ten Downing Street, politicians
have known there aren't many votes to be had by having P.
D. James and Ian McEwan around to lunch.
Georgie: You mention P. D. James. I've read a couple of your Dan Kavanagh
detective novels...
Barnes: Have you just? And survived to tell the tale!
Georgie: Oh yes—I liked them a lot. I am a bit of a British mystery
addict, and a big fan of P. D. James in particular. Were there any memories
of writing the Kavanagh mysteries when you wrote Arthur and George?
Barnes: Well, when you are writing a novel there are various things
you are anxious about, and having written four mysteries twenty years ago—
more than twenty years ago—I did think, well, I don't need to
worry about that side of things. I can do an exciting narrative with the police
and with a detective involving a crime and so forth, and as I did train as a
lawyer I felt okay with the courtroom stuff.
Georgie: Did you? I didn't know that.
Barnes: Yes, I trained as a barrister once, never practiced. And so
I thought, I've got enough to worry about elsewhere but I won't have to worry
about that.
Georgie: You obviously had to read diaries or letters for Flaubert's
Parrot. Did you have to for this book, and if so, how does it feel to use
source material that may not have been intended for anyone else's eyes?
Barnes: Actually, there weren't really any private documents that I
came across. There are some letters, but the Conan Doyle estate is a very curious
estate. It has been very keen on milking money, as much as possible, and also
very secretive, refusing to answer any approaches from any writers. I got a
contact for the chief fellow—chief beneficiary or something—through
a Conan Doyle biographer who was greatly approved of, and he said "this
is the person to email" and "I will email the fellow in advance, follow
up after that." And so I did, and got absolutely no response. In a way
I thought, well that is fine, I can have my own Conan Doyle from now on. I don't
have any authority and so therefore this is unauthorized. It is fiction anyway,
so I'm just going to go on ahead. I am aware that there are in fact Conan Doyle
letters to his mother in existence, but they haven't been published; they are
being edited at the moment. Although from what I have seen of them it's not
exactly hot stuff.
Georgie: Your love of Flaubert
is something you frequently comment on. In what way do you think Madame
Bovary was the first modern novel, and how would you define "modern"
in this respect?
Barnes: I think that it was the first modern novel in that it brought
realism to its... well, the first realistic novel was started in France by Balzac,
really. Although you could say the realistic novel was started by Don
Quixote, the first great novel... and all these general remarks are filled
with holes of course... But in rough terms Madame Bovary brought the realistic
novel to a state of perfection. And more than that: novels were rather written
on the hoof before that; they had been written for serial publication. You would
start a novel, write a bit of it, publish a bit of it, you'd write a bit more,
and publish that, and so on. Flaubert was the first person who said a line of
prose can be, and should be, as beautiful as a line of poetry, and as immutable.
So it was the quality of the prose.
Also then, it was the structure. He said you have got to plan a novel from
beginning to end, and all the sub-themes must chime in with the main themes,
and it must all be a tremendous mechanism apart from anything else. A piece
of machinery. Apart from being a representation of life, it is a brilliantly
working piece of machinery. Plus, he was writing a realistic description of
modern life and was not a moralist, was not saying, "Here's a novel with
a piece of advice on how to live." All those things, I think, make it the
first modern novel.
Georgie: Well, you've convinced me! Some of my favorite novels, including
some of your own, have been written by your contemporaries—Martin
Amis, Ian McEwan,
and if I can include the slightly younger Kazuo
Ishiguro in there, too—as well as some written by some British authors
whom, to my mind, have been influenced by your contemporaries—Jonathan
Coe, Rupert Thomson.
What writers have influenced you, and do you think the same ones influenced your
peers?
Barnes: That's tricky. I could give you a list of writers I read when
I was growing up, and it would include people like Graham
Greene and Evelyn
Waugh, Aldous
Huxley and George
Orwell, but I'm always very unclear as to what actual effect they had on
my writing. I don't know—Shakespeare,
Flaubert are there. You can make a huge list of people you admired but often
the writer is the last person to see what he or she has taken from someone else.
What's characteristic of my generation of British writers is that they look
in different directions, and that they look in different directions from the
previous generation of writers—although there are exceptions like Anthony
Burgess or William
Golding, and lots of one-offs. Martin Amis looked very firmly to America,
and I looked very firmly to the continent—my work is as much by way of
French and Russian as it is British. And then there are Salman
Rushdie and Ishiguro and others who came to Britain at a young age, from
a different racial background, and brought that with them. You know, Salman
Rushdie talks about "The Empire Writes Back," and he said it as a
joke but people have taken it seriously. I think my generation looks out a lot
but also includes a lot of people who have come in, so it is quite hybrid and
I think we write very differently from one another and I don't think we're a
school. There may be too many boys! And I think that is one trouble, but that
is not my fault! I never stopped any woman writing. I might want to stop a few
boys writing. But that's another matter.
Georgie: You worked as a journalist (and still do) in Britain as well
as for the New Yorker. And I've heard you chatting with Clive James about
New Yorker fact checkers and admitting to not knowing about the difference
between that and which. (God, I loved you for that!) I also remember
a while ago there was a review by Louis Menand about Lynne Truss's book on grammar
in the New Yorker that skewered Truss (an Englishwoman) and her editor's
sloppy editing of a grammar book. Do you think there is a difference between
the American and British editing of journalism?
Barnes: I think there is. There aren't really any fact checkers in Britain.
It's not a profession in Britain. And when you write an article for an American
magazine you run up against the fact checkers, who quite a lot of the time save
your bacon and quite a lot of the time just bug you to hell. But you also run
up against what I call the "style police," which are (who are?
that are? whatever!) who are dedicated to changing the rhythm of
your prose for the sake of grammar and messing it up, basically. That is my
attitude towards them. I never knew the difference between that and which
although it has been explained to me many times. My rule was always if there
was that in the sentence already I'd use a which. Seems pretty
safe to me. I do think there is much more grammatical interference in American
journals or magazines than there is in British. I think we are much sloppier
in Britain with our editing, especially nowadays. I have written for newspapers
for many years. Nowadays, if you email something in, the next thing that happens
is you see it in the paper. Whereas in the old days you would mail your hard
copy off, in the post, and the next thing is that you'd get a telephone call
and it's your editor and he's saying, "Do you think we can change this?
What do you think of this?" I think that there is something to do with
receiving it in email form and it is there on the screen; it looks ready to
print, and so they just print it.
Georgie: Right—just copy and paste. You see really obvious errors
in the Observer and the Guardian all the time.
Barnes: Exactly. And that's regrettable, actually. I don't want to
sound like an old fart but it is true that the quality of literary editing has
declined in the last thirty years. People used to spend a great deal of time
making copy better and making suggestions whereas now it just gets shoved in
and sent out.
Georgie: It's ironic that in American journalism there is a great deal
of time fact checking and editing grammar, and yet they miss something huge
such as journalists like Jayson Blair and Judith Miller sending in stories that
are made-up or misleading.
Barnes: That isn't usually the fault of the fact checkers; that is the
fault of the people in charge of the journalists. A journo is likely enough
to get out of control, and if you are a journo who is making up a story you
are also likely to be making up quotes in your notebook which is being read
back to the fact checker. I actually have always admired fact checkers. And
the thing about fact checkers is that they are always tremendously polite. They
call me Mr. Barnes all the time. Which means it is impossible to be short or
rude with them. Actually, my favorite fact checker correction recently occured
when I had interviewed someone about a Queen's committee that design the stamps
and medals, and they meet at Buckingham palace. I asked my source, a British
writer called Marina Warner, what the meetings were like and she said, "Oh,
it's like the Mad Hatter's Tea Party!" I put this in as a quote, and the
fact checker said, "Mad Hatter's Tea Party?" and I said "Yes,"
and he said, "Were you aware that it was actually the March Hare who gave
the tea party?" And I said "But it's known as the Mad Hatter's Tea
Party," and he said, "I know, but the March Hare gave the tea party."
And I said "But that is what she said." And round and round we went.
They nearly made me change it to the March Hare's Tea Party, which would have
been completely meaningless. It was so funny. I found myself prolonging the
conversation—it was that funny—because it is Lewis
Carroll upside-down logic, isn't it?
Georgie: He would have loved it!
Barnes: He would have! Laughed his head off!
Georgie: You said earlier you had a lot of free rein, because of the
estate and so on, but has anyone tried to "fact check" this novel?
At readings or elsewhere?
Barnes: My readers are my fact checkers, I suppose. I have had
one or two corrections. I've been told I'm not very good on the aristocracy,
regarding when I say Lady Conan Doyle or when I say Lady Jean, and there are
always lots of snobs who will correct you. I got one or two things wrong there.
I think I also got something wrong about shooting wild birds because that is
also not an area of my expertise. I think I put the wrong bird in the wrong
wood or something. But I like that sort of stuff because it means people are
reading carefully.
Georgie: And what about editing in fiction? I met Gary Fisketjon at
Knopf a while ago and discovered he'd edited some of my favorite writers—
Jonathan Coe, Ishiguro...
Barnes: And me!
Georgie: I was wondering about that! I had thought he'd worked with
you, but then Sonny Mehta's letter came with my reading copy.
Barnes: Well, yes, I seem to be in the privileged position of having
two editors somehow, both of whom I like and admire greatly. But I'm never quite
sure who is in charge of me. I think Sonny Mehta signs the checks! And Gary Fisketjon
provides the editorial suggestions.
Georgie: Lucky you! I have noticed that these editors don't seem to
get mentioned on the finished books—perhaps in the acknowledgments if the novelist
has written fifteen novels and they have run out of people to thank for something.
But I wonder if it is whether they play a smaller role in fiction or whether
it is just "not the done thing"?
Barnes: I think you thank them privately. This may sound a bit rough
by saying it's their job, but well, that is what it is called. It's their job,
you know? It can also become more complicated—sometimes an editor becomes
a friend and it's a slightly more difficult transaction. You sometimes see those
pages of thanks in books and absolutely everyone is thanked right down to the
person who tied your shoelaces that morning. I think sometimes there can be
over-thanking. I think a certain amount of thanking should be done privately
at the time of publication.
Georgie: Perhaps it is an American thing—a certain effusiveness?
Barnes: Yes, there is that. Also my primary publisher is in Britain
and he sees it first and does what he needs to get done. By the time it gets
to America there is less to be done.
Georgie: Just all the removing of the "u"s in words like behaviour
and humour.
Barnes: Exactly.
Georgie: I've been asked to judge a book contest for the first time.
Do you have an opinion on book awards? Have you been asked to judge on a panel,
and if so what were your experiences?
Barnes: I was on a panel of judges for the Guardian First Book Award
and voted successfully, along with many others, for Zadie
Smith's first book.
I do have quite strong views on book awards. My view is that as a writer you
should regard them entirely as "posh bingo" and as utter luck and
nothing more. And if you are a member of the judging panel you should regard
them as the absolutely most objective and perfect example of literary decision-making
there could possibly be.
I also think that judges of literary prizes should make their decisions in
private and then absolutely shut up and never talk about it. One of the things
that mars the Booker Prize is judges earning themselves another hundred quid
by writing a tell-all piece, which is inevitably hurtful to some writers. I
don't think they should even publish long-lists of books. I think they should
publish a short list, and one winner and not comment on it. I think they
should say "This is the best book, according to us. End of story."
But that is because I've experienced the fallout of one or two things like this
in the past.
Julian Barnes spoke to me at our Powells.com offices on February 13, 2006.
I was absurdly nervous and he was ridiculously fabulous. And very funny.
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