On Sundays Gothamist runs opinion pieces relevant to life in New York and reviews of recent books and performances. The judgments expressed below are entirely those of the author.

I remember telling a friend, after finishing Michael Chabon’s The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay, that Wonder Boys had not prepared me for this brilliance. I think I’ll be saying the same thing about Julian Barnes’ latest novel, Arthur & George. I’ve read A History of the World in 10 1/2 Chapters. I’ve read Flaubert’s Parrot. What’s more, I loved them both very much (which is more than I can say about the slightly anemic Wonder Boys). Nonetheless, I wasn’t prepared for the mature, measured force of Arthur & George.

Any novel that’s titled with two first names is going to give you a good sense of the players involved – but a small caveat, if I may. Barnes has created a work of historical fiction out of the lives of real people. Don’t do what I did – don’t go looking up their identities and connection to each other before Barnes unravels it for you, in the brilliant way he does. You’ll only render moot the slow care with which Barnes reveals his intent throughout the first half of the novel. Suffice it to say that the Arthur in question is none other than Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, and the George is a young, serious man named George, from the Midlands, and his life becomes inseparably linked with Conan Doyle’s.

We begin with both Arthur and George in childhood, and a curious trick of Barnes’ – setting Arthur’s narrative in the past tense while George’s lingers vividly in the present – sets them apart immediately, making Arthur’s story seem like a thing of history while George’s feels like we’re following alongside, heart in throat about the troubles we can feel up ahead. We follow Arthur as he becomes the Conan Doyle of legend, from success to success, starting with that shadowed companion of his, Sherlock Holmes. Only when Arthur’s literary creation is named does Barnes let his famous last name slip, but Barnes knows he’s not fooling us – he let us see who Arthur was beforehand.