April 2026: Julian Barnes

Our April author is Julian Barnes (19 January 1946)

An English author who won the Man Booker in 2011 with The Sense of an Ending and the Jerusalem Prize in 2021 for his body of work.

He had also dabbled in the genres with his crime writing under the name Dan Kavanagh. And as most writers, he had published some stories and non-fiction.

He is a new author for me. What do you plan to read this month?

I've decided to read Arthur & George.

I've read The Sense of an Ending and The Noise of Time. The Noise of Time is a haunting novel about composer Dmitri Shostakovich which I found fascinating, but does require a little knowledge of the composer's life (& controversies) to fully appreciate.

This month I plan to read Cross Channel (1996), a collection of his short stories.

I have got The man in the red coat, The sense of an ending and The noise of time on the deck. I read Arthur and George a while back and found it enjoyable, but not very memorable.

I will also read Arthur & George, the only book I have by this author, but also I am interested as I have read Conan Doyle's own book The Case of George Edalji.

I have finished Arthur & George. This is a fictionalised version of a famous miscarriage of justice in which Sir Arthur Conan Doyle helped prove the innocence of a mixed race Staffordshire lawyer George Edalji. Edalji was a mild-mannered, bookish and very myopic young man who was bizarrely arrested, tried and convicted of maiming cattle and writing poison pen letters harassing himself and his own family. Doyle only became involved after Edalji had served three years of a seven year prison sentence with penal servitude and was then bizarrely released but not pardoned. Edalji and his supporters were writing to the Home Office and influential people such as Doyle for help. Raw from the recent death of his consumptive first wife, Doyle threw himself into the case despite numerous rebuffs and eventually managed to squeeze a pardon out of the Home Office, but no compensation. As the son of an Indian father, who was probably the first Asian man to be a vicar in the Church of England, and a Scottish mother, George and his siblings were unusual for the time, especially in rural western England. Doyle and other commentators have always argued that racial prejudice was at the heart of the persecution of Edalji, though he himself didn't think his racial origins were the main factor. Aside from the tragic human aspects of the miscarriage of justice, Edalji's case was instrumental in leading to the setting up of the Court of Criminal Appeal; prior to this, there was no direct appeal process against criminal convictions, and plaintiffs had to appeal to the Home Office for an administrative review of their cases.

As a fictionalised double biography, the early sections of the novel consist of rapidly alternating vignettes into the lives of Arthur and George, with longer passages during the crucial events affecting George. I thought some of the digressions into Doyle's much richer life were not really germane to the story and could have been omitted. The final section after Doyle's death in 1930, mostly set at a spiritualist rally at which it was claimed that Doyle ((in)famously a believer in spiritualism) appeared, was I thought the dullest part of the book, though it provided an opportunity for George to reflect on matters of life and death. He lived out the rest of his life peacefully at least, practising law and keeping himself to himself, unmarried and living with his spinster sister Maud. Overall, while an excellent read, I thought the book was just a bit too long.

I have finished The noise of time and liked it very much. The setup using the leap year sequence was quite clever, and he brings across the oppressive atmosphere of the Stalin years convincingly.

>7 MissWatson: So glad you enjoyed The Noise of Time. I am struggling with his short story collection Cross Channel.

>8 kac522: That one looks good, I hadn't heard of it before, it's now on my wishlist.

I’m going to try Flaubert’s Parrot.
Melany

I finished Cross Channel (1996), a collection of 10 short stories, each set in a different time period, about Brits in France. Most, unfortunately, were forgettable. The only one where I truly felt engaged was "Evermore", probably set in the early 1960s, about an elderly British woman who every year makes the trip to northern France to visit her brother's WWI grave in a British cemetery. Her memories of her brother, of the war, and of her life dedicated to his memory was the most moving story in the collection for me.

>11 kac522: it sounds like an interesting concept, though.

>12 MissWatson: I thought so, too, but the stories just didn't work for me, except a couple.

I have also finished The sense of an ending and I can’t quite make up my mind what bothers me about it. In the first part I kept wondering what the male equivalent of chick lit would be, it seemed so obsessed with maleness (or is that simply a result of male-only schools?). And in the second part I felt just as baffled by Veronica’s behaviour as poor Tony, I simply didn’t "get" it. Was there information missing? or did I simply not pick up on the vital signals?
I also noticed that Tony repeatedly used certain phrases, just as they did appear in TNOT. Is that his usual style of writing, like a sprinkling of motifs?

I was sad to finish Barnes final book having been a fan for decades. I started with Before She Met Me and ended with Departure(s) which I reviewed. Highly recommend both, but you really can’t go wrong with a Barnes book.

My favourite by Julian Barnes remains the first novel I read by this prominent author Flaubert's Parrot. I also quite enjoyed Staring at the Sun and to a lesser extent The Sense of an Ending. I was very disappointed with The Only Story and decided to limit my exposure to Barnes' later period works.
I wanted to read Arthur and George in April but I have fallen so much behind with my reading that the book remained on the shelf unopened. Still intend to read it at a later time.