Arthur & George

Never read a book if you can discern the reason you’re reading it. Was I unfairly enticed by the idea of Arthur Conan Doyle, creator of Sherlock Holmes, taking on a real-life mystery? I like a good plot as much as the next woman, and I enjoyed Julian Barnes’s Flaubert’s Parrot, so I thought, here we have an author I like, a situation that intrigues me (I own, and have read, The Complete Annotated Sherlock Holmes, which is a delightful example of people taking fiction way too seriously, and yet, what’s wrong with that? There are a lot of worse things to take seriously), and a setting I want to read about (I mistakenly thought the book would take place in Edinburgh).

Well, I was disappointed. Even if one had no expectations from the author and no misapprehensions about the setting, I can’t imagine how the ending could fail to disappoint. And maybe my taste is not subtle enough, but I found hardly any of those extremely interesting ideas that fill Flaubert’s Parrot.

I blame the literary craft. Was Barnes trying to follow a novelistic scheme taught in a writing class or a how-to-sell-your-book workshop? I kind of doubt it, because it wasn’t all that gripping, but it seemed much more conventional than Flaubert’s Parrot. Let’s forget Arthur and George and revisit the book I actually liked.

Flaubert’s Parrot seemed imperfect to me. It didn’t seem like a very cohesive book. I think it took on way too many ideas and didn’t fully develop them. But, in the end, I think I like that better. You read the stuff he says and you think, “Hey, I love what he said. I want to hear more.” Whereas if an author has fully developed his themes, you don’t really want to hear more.

I loved the way Barnes expressed Flaubert’s philosophies in Flaubert’s words and in his own. There were many captivating ideas about writing, which was a well-developed theme of the book. This is great:

Do the books that writers don’t write matter? The imagination doesn’t crop annually like a reliable fruit tree. The writer has to gather whatever’s there: sometimes too much, sometimes too little, sometimes nothing at all. And in the years of glut there is always a slatted wooden tray in some cool, dark attic, which the writer nervously visits from time to time; and yes, oh dear, while he’s been hard at work downstairs, up in the attic there are puckering skins, warning spots, a sudden brown collapse and the sprouting of snowflakes. What can he do about it?

There are entries I’ve planned for this blog that are right now puckering and sprouting snowflakes. It’s weird how something completely irrelevant to this world (are any of the posts I do actually post relevant to contemporary existence?) can still have an expiration date.

And even though I was frustrated by the woefully inadequate development of the narrator’s own history, I think it was vividly described in mentions here and there:

And you do come out of it [mourning a death], that’s true. After a year, after five. But you don’t come out of it like a train coming out of a tunnel, bursting through the Downs into sunshine and that swift, rattling descent to the Channel; you come out of it as a gull comes out of an oil-slick. You are tarred and feathered for life.

The reader knows next to nothing about this death. But sometimes it’s best just to say a little bit. It has more impact. You get an idea of what’s happened, but not too much. You never really get to the bottom of it. Life is like that too. I won't even get started on what he says about love. I want to include one last quote about reading. I’ve had conversations like this that raise similar questions about the pointlessness of writing. I have what I think are good motivational answers, but I just want to share the beautifully expressed question for now.

Some people, as they grow older, seem to become more convinced of their own significance. Others become less convinced. Is there any point to me? Isn’t my ordinary life summed up, enclosed, made pointless by someone else’s slightly less ordinary life? I’m not saying it’s our duty to negate ourselves in the face of those we judge more interesting. But life, in this respect, is a bit like reading. And as I said before: if all your responses to a book have already been duplicated and expanded upon by a professional critic, then what point is there to your reading? Only that it’s yours. Similarly, why live your life? Because it's yours. But what if such an answer gradually becomes less and less convincing?