Arthur And George: Julian Barnes
Mar. 14th, 2014 07:03 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
poliphiloA true story and a very good one. Barnes has novelized it to the extent of inventing conversations, thoughts and feelings but I don't think there's a person in it who didn't actually exist.
In certain respects truth does turn out to be stranger than fiction. No novelist could have created a character as heterogeneous as Arthur Conan Doyle. People in fiction have to be consistent to be believable, they need to hang together and be typical- to an extent- of their age and class and gender. But Doyle is all over the place; Irish by ancestry, Scots by birth, English by choice, a doctor, a novelist, a sportsman, a campaigner for justice, a spiritualist- a man of large appetites and emotions but rigorously chivalric in his dealings with women: really, you couldn't make him up.
In certain respects truth does turn out to be stranger than fiction. No novelist could have created a character as heterogeneous as Arthur Conan Doyle. People in fiction have to be consistent to be believable, they need to hang together and be typical- to an extent- of their age and class and gender. But Doyle is all over the place; Irish by ancestry, Scots by birth, English by choice, a doctor, a novelist, a sportsman, a campaigner for justice, a spiritualist- a man of large appetites and emotions but rigorously chivalric in his dealings with women: really, you couldn't make him up.
