A question of tents

The Buena Vista Social Club plays softly over the PA as we enter the main tent for the first Meet the Author session of the Edinburgh book festival.

The lights dim, and after a short wait there is movement in the wings and warm applause. Julian Barnes emerges, holding a copy of his latest book, Arthur and George, aloft in greeting.

He makes himself comfortable in a plexiglass chair and pours himself a glass of water from the jug standing on the plexiglass table.

After a short introduction and another wave of the book he starts with a brief reading from it, beginning in Edinburgh.

He ignores the plexiglass lectern, preferring to lean forward in his chair, his head bent down a little towards the text. His voice drops as he reads, becomes more measured, a little quieter. The audience is still as the soft babble of the crowd outside drifts through the walls of the tent.

He leans back to acknowledge the applause as he finishes. He is more animated as he explains how he found the case of George Edalji in an introduction to a book about the Dreyfus case.

It wasn't the character of Arthur Conan Doyle that first appealed. "He came with the case," says Barnes. "I was attracted by the drama of the case and he was there. One shouldn't say this perhaps, but if it had been Kipling I would have been happier."

He was more intrigued by the parallels between Conan Doyle's struggle to exonerate an unknown half-Parsi lawyer and his struggle to justify his relationship with Jean Leckie. "There is a certain moment when you look at a story and you think 'gotcha'," he says.

He finds questions about the status of the book "slightly tiresome". "If you tried to write about that case as non-fiction then the only way you could do it would have been to fill it with 'George must have felt that ...', 'it must have been the case that ...' - the very worst parts of biography." A fictional treatment was "the only way of bringing it alive".

His own status as a "reformed crime novelist" may have helped him with certain corners of the book, but he never thought that "finally I was putting together my two writing souls".

The rain starts up again as the session is opened to the floor. He admires Michel Tournier, though the French novel is "a bit like English cricket - it rather comes and goes in its effectiveness". He describes how his impressions of a novel change as he talks about it, "you always wind up talking about certain aspects of it" and a visitor from Mumbai compliments him on his treatment of the Parsi family - "the best review I've had so far", he says.

A last wave of the book and the Buena Vista Social Club strikes up once more. The dash to the signing tent begins.