"By the time you arrive on set, the crew have already got their shit together." Salles's Dark Water is based on the 2002 Japanese hit by Hideo Nakata, a ghostly story about a mother and her young daughter moving into a dilapidated apartment He calls the cast "a good group of people". Jennifer Connelly plays the mother; his old friend Dougray Scott is her ex-husband; Pete Postlethwaite is the apartment building's janitor and John C Reilly a slimy real estate agent "I love him," says Roth. "He's like a big teddy bear." Roth plays Connelly's divorce lawyer, Platzer, a kindly soul whose car doubles as his temporary office, complete with fax machine in the passenger seat. But how much else do I need? I know what his purpose, his publicly stated purpose was in going there, but what was his novelistic purpose?"In among all the facts, there remained "this great, great black hole in the middle of him which is the novelist's natural territory", somewhere for the woodworm imagination to get to work: "These years when he was married to his first wife, chastely, and in love with his second wife, also chastely." Or not: for most of the decade that his first wife, Louise, was ill with consumption, Conan Doyle was courting his second, Jean Leckie. It's also a good example of the sort of things you know whether from research or from imagination, but don't use, but you need to have them there."During the Boer War, Conan Doyle volunteered for service as a medical officer, spending some months on campaign and, in what Barnes makes an epiphanic moment, stumbling across the corpse of a nameless British trooper. "I need to send him to South Africa because there's this key moment with the dead soldier on the veldt. Barnes cites his literary hero, Flaubert: "Flaubert said 'I need to know lots of stuff, I need to furnish the room but not always describe all the furniture in it.
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"And that makes it all the more poignant - he'd arrived, he'd created his life, he was an authority." And then came the scandal."In some ways it was easier writing George, and in some ways more rewarding," he confesses. With Arthur, though, "there's too much there already, and it was harder selecting and yet still being true to what is known." He researched Conan Doyle's life in great detail - visiting the places he had visited, checking the railway timetables to find out how he could have got from A to B, where he would have stopped on the way.Most of this knowledge is never used, but not useless. For instance, Homais, in Madame Bovary, I always think of as lightly pockmarked and yet I never mention it in the novel.' Brilliant example: actually, if you read the novel he does mention that he's lightly pockmarked Good example of the novelist forgetting. "Because there's not much material, George doesn't exist in the historical record.
In both cases, a famous writer came to the rescue: Zola of Dreyfus, Conan Doyle of George. Why, then, had George's case vanished? True, the Dreyfus Affair involved treason, while the Great Wyrley Outrage involved mutilation of animals; but then the British are probably more shocked by mutilation of animals than by treason. Within this obscure affair lies a patch of darker obscurity: George himself This was itself an attraction. George exists in Conan Doyle's account of him, with a brief characterisation of him which I have George disagree with in the book, and he wrote a few newspaper articles and he wrote a book about railway law." Barnes set about deducing George's character from, among other things, the legal prose of the railway book: "There was a sort of humour in it which I hadn't expected somehow from what I'd read about him."The novel includes some of the examples George chose, such as the case of the hugely fat Frenchman whose bulk prevented him from passing through the narrow doors of second- or third-class compartments, but who refused to pay for a first-class ticket "Clearly a very clever young man," says Barnes. "It's a challenge to have one character who's extremely well known and well documented and someone who you have to invent from scratch," says Barnes. Both involved manipulation of evidence by authorities certain they had found the right man, forgery, a miscarriage of justice, hard labour, and a racial element: George's clergyman father was a converted Parsee from Bombay. I wrote about it because I couldn't read about it."Sitting in his north London local, breaking off occasionally to watch Roger Federer cruise through the semis at Wimbledon, Barnes told me about his first encounter with the Great Wyrley Outrages.
