He’s damn good, Julian Barnes; no doubt about that. But what exactly is it that he’s best at? I have never been able to work it out. Arthur & George, his tenth novel, is a crime novel, a two-person biography, a romance, a historical novel, and a philosophical speculation all rolled into one — and I enjoyed it very much. But at the end of it, as with so much of Barnes’s fiction, I felt a curious fizzing, and frustration at my inability to put my finger on the reason.

I say this is Barnes’s tenth novel, but in fact, immediately after publishing Metroland, his first, he had two detective novels published under a pseudonym, Dan Kavanagh. Two more came out in 1985 and 1987; all four shared the same hero, a bisexual, ex-police officer called Duffy. Under his own name, meanwhile, he has written not just his clever and engaging novels, but three brilliant collections of essays (including one on cooking), two collections of short stories and a translation of some profoundly moving memoirs by the 19th-century French writer, Alphonse Daudet.

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