Unlikely friends

The prolific English writer Julian Barnes got around most of these snares between fact and fiction with his celebrated 1985 novel ''Flaubert's Parrot"; in depicting a narrator's obsession with Gustave Flaubert, Barnes relied on Flaubert's life and then left it behind for a pyrotechnical treatise on art and reality. His novels and stories in the ensuing years have taken similar liberties of style and substance, but ''Arthur & George," his 12th work of fiction, which returns to the chronicles of Arthur Conan Doyle for its meaty plot, is a less radical imagining. The novel received rave reviews in Britain and was considered a favorite for last fall's Man Booker Prize; English readers seemed particularly fond of the realism Barnes had employed -- no metafiction here, no jumping-off points for postmodern narrative. Instead Barnes has focused on a passionate subplot of Doyle's life -- a miscarriage of justice that occurred in late 19th-century rural England -- and given it microscopic detail and life. The results are mostly admirable, as Barnes has created brilliantly intimate portraits of two men whose crossed paths will define them both. But perhaps because ''Arthur & George" is a piece of rich history transformed into fiction, it also suffers from its own excesses: too much information, particularly in the last half of the novel, about local color and the specificities of Edwardian England. Let's just say it succumbs to a form of literary gout.