Julian Barnes: Arthur & George

I was already well into the book when I found out that the "Arthur" of the novel is Arthur Conan Doyle, turning out to help George to regain his life which was stolen from him by ill-meaning neighbors.

Sure enough I bought the book because it was one of the shortlisted novels for the Booker Prize of that year. I was also attracted by what I meant was the main theme of the book: the juxtaposition of two adults who had very diverse upbringings. This, however, turned out to be wrong. What I got instead was something of a sophisticated crime story plus portrait of some aspects of cultural phenomena at that time, like spiritualism (the most boring part of the book, it took up the bulk of the last pages), village and middle class life in the Victorian age.

This was not the first book of Julian Barnes I had read. Twenty years ago I read his Flaubert's Parrot which made him famous and even brought him to Munich, where I got to see him in a book reading. Recently I read his Lemon Table stories, which did not particularly enthuse me. Don't call me a Barnes fan because these two books did not leave any remaining impression. However, his Arthur & George is a book to remember.