Wednesday, March 21, 2007

Julian Barnes, Arthur and George

In a description of the writer Arthur Conan Doyle, Julian Barnes captures the detective writer’s calling and his awareness of what he was seeking to do. Barnes says:

“As he [Arthur Conan Doyle] sat down at his desk to begin his draft, he felt, for the first time since Touie’s [his wife] death, a sense of the properness of things. After the depression and guilt and lethargy, after the challenge and the call to action, he was where he belonged: a man at his desk with a pen in his hand, eager to tell a story and to make people see things differently.”

Source: Julian Barnes, Arthur and George (London: Jonathan Cape, 2005), 256.