Volume 53, Number 6 · April 6, 2006
A Matter of English Justice
By John Lanchester
Arthur & George
by Julian Barnes
Knopf, 388 pp., $24.95
From the novelist's point of view, reality all too often suffers from bad taste. The classic example concerns a true story that contains a perfect kernel of narrative but is fatally encrusted with the kind of events that reality, in its lax way, doesn't mind, but which are horribly damaging to a work of fiction. Coincidence, for example, is rife in life but ruinous in fiction; ditto melodrama; ditto the more obvious kinds of hubris and dramatic irony. Henry James had the irritating habit, when someone was telling him an anecdote, of holding up his hand and stopping his interlocutor when he felt he had got the kernel of the story, before hearing the fatal extra details—a habit that must have been annoying, but that also makes sense. A novelist must have a strong intuition of when enough is enough. Reality couldn't care less. In the words of Geoffrey Braithwaite, the sad, dyspeptic narrator of Julian Barnes's wonderful novel Flaubert's Parrot:
Review, 3394 words
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