It's hot under the magnifying glass

A new novel about Sherlock Holmes creator Arthur Conan Doyle is getting very favourable reviews - author Julian Barnes tells Stuart Jeffries why he's afraid to read them

Julian Barnes does not read his reviews. Which is a shame because he's getting some very good ones for Arthur and George.

His 10th novel is based on the real-life whodunit that more than a century ago led Arthur Conan Doyle to metaphorically don his most famous creation's deerstalker and investigate. Peter Kemp in the Sunday Times wrote of it that "Barnes's suave, elegant prose - alive here with precision, irony and humaneness - has never been used better in this extraordinary true-life tale, which is as terrifically told as any by its hero Conan Doyle himself". Tim Adams in the Observer reckoned that Barnes had "taken the bones of a long-dead history and imbued them with vivid and memorable life".

No matter: Barnes will not be tempted. "When I started off I would read everything obsessively," he says over coffee at a pub near his north London home. "Regardless of the quality or lack of quality of a book, you would get a range of reviews from good to not so good.

"When my first novel Metroland (1980) was published it would be reviewed with Melvyn Bragg's new novel. One would say, 'Next to Bragg's symphonic new book, this batsqueak of autobiography bears little scrutiny'. The next would say, 'Besides Bragg's monument of windbaggery, this tightly constructed . . . "

Surely it's not the irritating spread of opinions that hurts - just the hostile ones? "I don't get any better at reading bad reviews. So seven or eight years ago I stopped." That was around the time that England, England came out - a book whose reviews were certainly mixed. DJ Taylor wrote in the Spectator: "Despite its weighty themes, this is a rather trivial and laboured performance," while in the Sunday Times John Carey claimed the book was "both funny and serious, a double-act that English novels rarely manage". You can see Barnes's point: which is nearer the truth? Better, perhaps, to adopt the Olympian pose of Martin Amis, who said during the papers' mutty mauling of Yellow Dog that he would trust posterity to get it right.

Did England, England's reception make reviews unreadable for you? "No, it's a question of self-protection and not having stuff that can fester in your head the wrong way. Some people don't mind - I read an interview with William Boyd in a French magazine recently in which he said: 'J'ai une peau epaisse.' (I have a thick skin.) Do you have a thin skin? "I'm not as bad as Philip Roth. He leaves the country when a book comes out."

Indeed, for publication Barnes has returned to this country with his wife, literary agent Pat Kavanagh, from a walking holiday in France - his spiritual if not actual second home. He may not read the reviews, but he has a code ready for interpreting the Barnesian brouhaha in the papers: "They'll tell me: 'X can come for tea. Or Y will not be welcome for tea.' I get the picture that way." Maybe the 59-year-old, one of Britain's most feted writers, should just read the bloody things and get Pat to hover with smelling salts.

Unwittingly, I put something in Barnes's head that festers during the interview. I suggest that Suzanne Dean's charming retro jacket design for Arthur and George, a dark mustard cloth binding embossed with a Punch-like illustration of the two protagonists, is Edwardian whimsy, of a piece with the style of a book that echoes the stateliness of certain Edwardian novels, notably Conan Doyle's. Mildly affronted, Barnes repeats "whimsy" several times during the rest of the interview.

The more I think about it, the more correct Barnes is to be affronted. Arthur and George is better than whimsy: it's a compelling, elegant if middle-brow return to form that is already being talked up as a possible Booker winner, in a year when Barnes is likely to go toe to toe once more with Ian McEwan, whose novel Amsterdam beat Barnes's shortlisted England, England to the Booker prize in 1998. Barnes has never won the Booker, though Flaubert's Parrot was shortlisted in 1984. This year, he and McEwan may well be shortlisted along with Ishiguro, Rushdie, Coetzee and Zadie Smith.

Barnes, on being told the Sunday Times is suggesting these big boys (Smith excepted) of "EngLit" are poised to carve up the Booker between them, says the idea is "ridiculous. It's just the way books get talked about. It just so happens that Ish, Ian, Salman and I have books out at the same time." What of his old friend Martin Amis, the other big boy writer of that generation, who he had been friendly with during their days on the New Statesman magazine and afterwards?

It was, according to Amis's memoir Experience, on January 12th 1995 that Barnes wrote a letter to his friend including a phrase that "consists of two words. The words consist of seven letters. Three of them are 'f's." That letter had been in response to Amis breaking with Kavanagh, his English agent of 23 years. Amis wrote back saying: "I will call you in a while - quite a long while." It's been 10 years - has Amis redeemed his pledge? "Va te perdre," (Get lost) says Barnes, with a steely look that suggests if there is a hatchet to be buried it will be in my head.

Moving on. Why did you write a book about the least interesting of eminent Edwardian writers? Why not about Ford, Wells, James, Kipling, Conrad or Shaw? "Because he came with the story." And it was the story of George Edjali, a Birmingham-based solicitor of Parsee origin, and his wrongful conviction for a series of horse and cattle maimings around Great Wyrley in Staffordshire, northern England, that sucked Barnes into its vortex - as inexorably as his treatment of it will seduce his readers across continental beaches this summer.

The book, despite its many meditations on a long-dead literary icon, is no Flaubert's Parrot. It could have been called "Conan Doyle's Hobby Horse", though that was not one of the 30 to 40 titles that Barnes considered for the book. "One suggestion was 'Conviction'." That's very good. "Yes, but it was too much like 'Atonement'. Then there was 'News from Distant Lands', which was too much like a Jonathan Raban travel book. In the end, I went with the working title, which other people seemed to like but I hadn't."

It was the great (and, since April, late) historian of France, Douglas Johnson, who suggested to Barnes that the Great Wyrley Outrage was the British parallel to the Dreyfus Affair - a miscarriage of justice in the heart of England that equally pointed up the nature of an imperial society shuddering into a new century. Racism, fears of miscegenation, imputations of sexual dysfunction, an establishment cover-up, suspicious footprints - the story had everything.

It even had its Emile Zola - Conan Doyle, who, after nosing around Staffordshire, wrote a pamphlet that accused the constabulary of convicting the wrong man. It wasn't Edjali, the son of a Church of England vicar, who was responsible for the fatal slashings of livestock, he claimed, but some ne'er-do-well from Walsall with sociopathic tendencies and a plausible blade hanging in the kitchen.

"I think both cases say something about their different countries," says Barnes. "It shows the way that the French are actively engaged with their own history. In Britain we are not."

You're analysing jolly old England again, aren't you? "I guess, but obliquely this time. In England, England I tackled it head on. The idea there was that the notion of England, an artificial notion in the first place, had become endangered, commercialised, Americanised and Europeanised."

I wonder if a nostalgia for a lost England accounts for your excavation of a long-forgotten Edwardian scandal? "I'm certainly regretful. I like the idea that countries are different." And England used to be different. At one point in the book, for instance, Conan Doyle, seething over the "balderdash" of a Home Office report, refuses to smoke a pipe to soothe his nerves,even though his wife urges him to. "Never in front of a lady," he barks. Barnes says he read that Conan Doyle had once been with his son in a railway carriage, when the son started smoking a pipe in front of a lady. "He broke it in two and threw it out of the window."

There is something cherishable about Conan Doyle's reactionary tendencies and his chivalry towards women, even if his sexual chasteness is, frankly, weird. "There is a tradition of English emotional reticence which can easily fall away into emotional inexpressiveness and frigidity," says Barnes. "I prefer that to the Oprahfication of the emotions - which is what has happened. People talking about their emotional lives in staggering detail on Celebrity Love Island is so banal. It's Princess Diana's fault. When things are wrong in England, it's always her fault, or Mrs Thatcher's, isn't it?"

The book unfolds with alternating narratives juxtaposing the eponymous characters' developments. George is raised in a Church of England vicarage, Arthur by a Catholic mother in shabby-genteel Edinburgh. Arthur becomes a doctor, then an overnight success as a writer; George remains a plodding solicitor, publishing a guide for rail passengers on their legal rights. Most intriguingly, Arthur is a one-time eye doctor who hopes to correct a misperception - the case against George - while George is chronically short-sighted though capable of great insights. In one of the novel's great scenes, George wanders near the Albert Memorial in London's Kensington Gardens and imagines. "And in that moment, George was struck by the realisation that everybody was going to be dead." George's imaginative insight spreads across the park like a neutron bomb, wiping out everybody. And yet again Barnes has broached one of his favourite literary subjects - death.

Throughout the book, how one moves from what little one actually sees to what one infers from it, how characters construct vast, teetering structures - from the Staffordshire constabulary's flimsy case against Edjali to the equally implausible rival case Conan Doyle assembles to indict the Walsall ne'er-do-well - is incessantly dramatised.

The book also deals with Conan Doyle's spiritualism, itself a close absence. At one point during a seance for the dead writer in the Albert Hall, George looks through his binoculars from the balcony to the stage, where a chair has been left for Conan Doyle.

Will George's feeble eyes ever behold the dead writer's spirit, which has reportedly been trying to communicate with the throng? It seems unlikely. What are the links between these ocular themes and the detective story? "It's about what you can prove, not just in the criminal sense but the emotional sense," says Barnes. He suggests the will to believe is often more important than what one actually sees.

Was he ever a Conan Doyle fan? "I read the Sherlock Holmes stories when I was a child. But I am not anything like him. I am not going to put a deerstalker on. Or grow a walrus moustache." Nor is Barnes a man of action like Conan Doyle, who in Arthur and George is forever doing - skiing Alpine passes, doctoring during the Boer war, clubbing seals in Greenland, clubbing golf balls in Surrey. It's hard to imagine him sitting still long enough to write a book. Barnes, by contrast, has emphasised that writing is "life declined". "Yes, I think I wrote that in a story about Turgenev. It's one of those things that you come up against as a writer. To what extent is writing an avoidance of life? To what extent is writing the most intense involvement with life? Flaubert once said: 'I have always tried to live in an ivory tower, but a tide of shit is beating at its walls'."

There is a parallel between Barnes and Conan Doyle: Barnes created a sleuth, too. Under the pseudonym Dan Kavanagh, he wrote four novels in the 1980s about a bisexual sleuth called Duffy. He did not prove as popular as Sherlock Holmes. When Holmes plunged to his death with his nemesis Moriarty, men in the City, London's banking district, wore black ribbons on their boaters. Eventually, Conan Doyle brought the sleuth back from beyond the grave. Duffy's return has never been so hotly demanded. Perhaps, then, Barnes sought to satisfy his long-neglected urge to write detective fiction in Arthur and George. Maybe he is using Conan Doyle as a springboard to dive into different waters.

Barnes denies this. "I deliberately didn't want to write a book that bounces off his work." A cunningly forensic mind is nonetheless behind Arthur and George. No wonder that after graduating from Oxford university, Barnes read for the bar; no wonder that a former detective writer can give Conan Doyle a run for his money in terms of well-laid twists and turns.

That said, Barnes cannot imagine being a campaigning writer as Conan Doyle became, bothering the establishment with his passionately held views. "I'm not a public platform person either by my own personal temperament or my literary temperament. I don't write novels in order to persuade people of things."

Why then do you write novels? "I can't answer that in a soundbite. I'll give you a reply in 3,000 words in a few weeks."

Arthur and George is published by Jonathan Cape, priced £17.99