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Julian Barnes's Arthur & George is a reconstruction of real life that turns into a history lesson rather than a novel, says Natasha Walter
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Natasha Walter The Guardian, Saturday 2 July 2005

Arthur & George by Julian Barnes, 352pp, Jonathan Cape, 17.99 What a gentle journey Julian Barnes, that previously prickly writer, offers his readers now. His new book lays out a quietly intriguing real-life tale of turn-of-the-century British crime and punishment. You can see why a novelist would be drawn to this story - it features Arthur Conan Doyle as the hero of his own detective narrative, as he campaigns for an innocent man, George Edalji, who is wrongfully convicted of sending anonymous letters and mutilating farm animals. With its juicy clash between life and art, it's just the sort of raw material that looks as though it will easily jump into life in the hands of an accomplished novelist. Rather surprisingly, given his previous record of writing sharp, brisk fiction, Barnes has decided to mould the tale into a leisurely historical novel in which we chunter through conversations at a snail's pace and original letters and articles are reproduced verbatim. The novel is partly told from Arthur's point of view and partly from George's, but it is all delivered in the same ponderous, detailed tone. Arthur does not just use a telephone, he uses a "GowerBell loudspeaking telephone, shaped like a candlestick"; his bride does not just wear a white dress, she wears a "dress, semi-Empire style with a Princess front, made of ivory silk Spanish lace, its designs outlined with fine pearl embroidery. The underdress is of silver tissue, the train, edged with white crepe de Chine, falls from a chiffon true-lovers' knot caught in with a horseshoe of white heather ..." What a change this is from Barnes's most successful piece of historical fiction, that bravura meditation on life and literature, Flaubert's Parrot. When he wrote that novel more than 20 years ago, Barnes wanted to mess with all the boundaries, telling snippets of Flaubert's life through the slanted view of a contemporary fan. Flaubert's Parrot was a quirky, challenging novel that worked hard to ask the reader what it is that we want when we look into writers' lives, and to suggest that we might never really get it. In contrast, this new novel delivers the conventional pleasure of historical fiction; of watching the past recreated with painstaking detail. It even includes a theatrical trial, where Barnes's heavy-handed reliance on detail bears fruit by adding portentousness to proceedings: "Then, before the assistant chairman Sir Reginald Hardy, two flanking magistrates, Captain Anson, the properly sworn members of an English jury, representatives of the Press, representatives of the public, and three members of his family, the indictment was read." To say the novel can feel heavy-handed does not mean it is tedious; it is a pleasant journey in which, naturally, we sympathise with George, find it refreshing when Arthur takes up his case and look forward to an ending in which George's innocence will be proved. To be sure, Arthur's intervention does not lead to a dramatic, Sherlock Holmes-like closure. There are loose ends, uncertainties and unproven accusations, which allow us to reflect on the difference

between the knowability of detective fiction and the unknowability of real life, which Barnes intelligently draws out for our edification. Barnes is always as intelligent as one would expect him to be. His subject gives him lots of opportunity for ruminations on the tricky boundaries between fiction and reality - above all, when Arthur believes that he has found the real culprit of the crime, but George finds his explanation too pat. "It was all, George decided, the fault of Sherlock Holmes. Sir Arthur had been too influenced by his own creation." An amusing point - but one that seems rather more the point of a critic or a biographer than of the man involved in the case, who might perhaps not stand so easily above the fray. But this is not the only time that George Edalji seems to speak with the urbane voice of Julian Barnes himself. Edalji is half-Indian, which gives Barnes a lot of opportunities to say intelligent things about racism too. At one point Edalji wonders why his case never achieved the fame of the Dreyfus case in France. Edalji had his champion in Conan Doyle just as Dreyfus had his in Zola, but "for all this the name of Dreyfus had constantly increased in fame, and was known around the globe, while that of Edalji was scarcely recognised in Wolverhampton ... he suspected his obscurity was something to do with England itself." The reflections that ensue on the nature of Englishness are neatly argued and convincing since England is indubitably a place "where great public eruptions took place from time to time, eruptions of feeling which might even tip over into violence and injustice, but which soon faded in the memory". This clever discussion feels like the heart of the novel, drawing out as it does the dark undercurrent of racism that lies within the Edalji case, and both celebrating and regretting the fact that the case has been half-forgotten. But Barnes could have written a straightforward history of the case and made these points just as effectively. In fact, they might have been even more convincing coming from Barnes rather than being put through the mouthpiece of Edalji, because despite all the pages and pages of heavily researched reconstruction, the characters never start up into ambiguous, breathing, moving life. When George goes to prison, for instance, we learn lots of facts about Edwardian gaols, but I wasn't sure that any of them brought me nearer to the experience of this single man sitting in one of the cells and facing his own individual tragedy. The same is true for Arthur. We learn so much biographical detail about him, about his interest in spiritualism, his affection for his mother, his cricket. But there is hardly a moment when we get past the careful diction and feel that we have overheard unstudied words of his own love or hate. Barnes is very good at flattering his readers, and making them feel that they are reading something rather more serious than a run-of-the-mill historical novel - but he is not very good at surprising them, at making them feel that they have stumbled inside the story rather than observing it at a safe distance. Although this novel is never less than intelligent, it is rarely much more than that either.

Show me the way to go, Holmes

Julian Barnes's wonderfully executed Arthur & George recounts Conan Doyle's own detective adventure Tim Adams The Observer, Sunday 26 June 2005 Arthur & George by Julian Barnes Jonathan Cape 17.99, pp360 Julian Barnes has always fancied a detective yarn. In the 1980s, he used to have a go at them himself, under the pseudonym of Dan Kavanagh, who wrote calculatedly hard-boiled tales about Duffy, a bisexual ex-cop on the trail of vice and murder in Soho. At the time, Barnes used to explain this sideline by saying it came from a different part of his head from the grown-up cleverness of Flaubert's Parrot or A History of the World in 10 Chapters; it was a holiday job. For Arthur & George, you might say that the author has combined for the first time those two halves of his brain, taken his rigour on vacation. With characteristically engaging intelligence, he has climbed into the mind of the most celebrated detective writer of all, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, and set off on an adventure. His novel begins as a pair of alternating biographies, a tale of opposites. On the one hand, a boy full of dreams, the young Conan Doyle, listening to Arthurian legend in his mam's Scottish kitchen, a promising athlete and scholar, the classroom wit and storyteller; on the other, a boy stripped of imagination, one George Edalji, son of a vicar in rural Staffordshire, poor and myopic, friendless and stolid. Any student of Conan Doyle, or decent Sherlockologist will know that these two names became linked in later life. George Edalji, who trained as a solicitor, was the victim of a famous miscarriage of justice, convicted in 1903 of mutilating livestock in his parish. After his release from a seven-year prison sentence, it was Conan Doyle who championed his case for a pardon in the newspapers and in parliament. The writer was asked many times in his life to put on Holmes's cloak and solve a mystery himself; the Edalji case was the only time he agreed. For much of the book, Barnes cuts quickly between these two fates - a page on Arthur, one on George - meticulously mapping their journey before they finally meet. You might expect along the way, from this author, some trickery, but Barnes seems more concerned here with an absolute formal clarity. His prose, and, particularly, his facility with dialogue, is a kind of homage to the stateliness of late Victorian letters and, in particular, to the creator of Sherlock Holmes, whose great gift was his ability to embed his narrative in speech. Barnes quotes Conan Doyle at one point on the subject of writing, as if as a statement of intent: 'Firstly, to be intelligible, secondly, to be interesting, and thirdly, to be clever.' Though this formality of tone gives the whole an antique

air, enhanced by the retro, buff, cloth covers of the Jonathan Cape edition, Arthur & George come quickly to life. For all the numerous retellings of Conan Doyle's life, it is hard to imagine that Barnes's semifictional version could be bettered in texture or acuity. In his elegant mini-chapters, he unpacks the writer's extraordinary rites of passage: his famous failure as an ophthalmologist; his work on a whaling ship; his sporting prowess - batting for the MCC, skiing Alpine passes; his heroism in the Boer War. Barnes has a sure feel for Conan Doyle's sense of propriety and duty - 'He has loved [his wife] as best he can,' he writes, 'given that he did not love her' - and for the challenges to it in the form of his lover, Jean Leckie. While Arthur is exerting his considerable influence on the world, George, a kind of rural Bartleby, is passing through life almost unnoticed. He is at school before he realises one of the reasons for this when one boy whispers to him: 'You're not a right sort.' George's father is Indian, a Parsee, who has married the daughter of a Scottish vicar, and has taken over the parish church in Great Wyrley. Set apart by his race, George is further estranged by his terrible eyesight. He sleeps and prays in his father's bedroom and devotes himself to his study of the law relating to the railways. Barnes recreates George's restricted view of his provincial world with great care and formidable research, and it is thus all the more affecting when he is accused of crimes which he could hardly comprehend, let alone commit. In some ways, Arthur & George is a kind of parable: the ophthalmologist lending his powers of observation to the near-blind, but if Barnes has a theme beyond the excavation of the gripping mystery at his novel's heart, it is the nature of Englishness. Conan Doyle was a Scot who wrote himself almost as closely into the heart of the empire as Kipling. George believes himself, as his father has told him, 'that he is English, he is a student of the laws of England, and one day, God willing, he will marry according to the rites and ceremonies of the Church of England'. When Arthur meets the solicitor, he suggests: 'You and I, George, you and I, we are unofficial Englishmen.' In this spirit, Conan Doyle used the trumped-up case against his friend to expose the endemic racism and corruption in the police force and beyond. In prison on remand, George reads some of Conan Doyle's shilling shockers as well as The Hound of the Baskervilles. It is Conan Doyle's indelible creation who hovers in the background when the pair meet, too, a fact that troubles the author, who felt ambivalence towards his mercurial alter ego throughout his life: his access to the main players in this case, and to their psychology was 'largely thanks to Holmes, although thanking Holmes did not come easily to Arthur'. The fictional detective would have been proud of his creator none the less for piecing together the parts of a mystery that had confounded the police. He would perhaps, too, have been rather impressed with Julian Barnes, who has taken the bones of a long-dead history and imbued them with vivid and memorable life.

The Case of the Sore Thumb Elementary, My Dear Watson

By David Thomson 1/16/06 12:00am

The New York Observer

For years, Julian Barnes has been not quite Nabokov or W.G. Sebald. Not quite there yet? Or not quite Julian Barnes? Hes been funny, chilled, sparkish, a dandyish surveyor of fiction and its tropes who often seems like a droll, finger-snapping ringmaster guiding his adroit innovations past literary statuary, picking up prizes, yet never entering into that unequivocal embrace with audiences an author might want. Has he been too clever for his own good? Now he appears to be on the run from his own coiled intelligence and reaching out for bonds that may seem comforting after the shock of terrorist attack, et dreary cetera. Its depressing to see someone as intelligent (and historically alert) as Mr. Barnes rallying to good causes just because everything has changed. Still, in Arthur & George he yearns to mend the world of its hatreds and violence. Is this gratifying? Well, yes and no. His new novel is warmer, more humane, but still not quite Ragtime: Julian Barnes is not quite E.L. Doctorow. George is an oddity who lacks the imagination to see how easily he will become a scapegoat. Hes the son of the vicar at Great Wyrley in the English Midlands in the 1890s, not unusually bright, held back by short sight and oddly unaware that his school class includes names like Sid Henshaw Harry Charlesworth and Wallie Sharp. George is 16 before Mr. Barnes reveals (on page 29) that his family name is actually Edalji. Readers may hesitate over pronouncing that name, and nearly every character in the book has trouble with it. But thats a small obstacle compared with Mr. Barnes having to concede (without quite mentioning it) that the vicars son (and the vicar) are of color. Theyre Indian, Parsees, there in the lanes and fields of Staffordshire, sore thumbs trying to be dutiful country gentlemen. For English audiences, theres the subtext that this Staffordshire is the heartland Enoch Powell beheld in the 1960s, when he prophesied a fatal tainting of blood and great troubles to follow on the reckless mix of racial tolerance and intolerance in the British Empire. The Edaljis are persecuted. At first, the enemy seems more Lewis Carroll than fascist underclass. Mr. Barnes the antic inventor is gripped by surreal glee as strangers send bizarre but unrequested goods to the vicarage. (Will they respond by opening a new kind of shop?) But then the narration steadies with grim factual account. You see, these people existed, and poor George, having become a solicitor (second-class honors in the exams), and having written a useful pamphlet on the railways and the law, becomes the victim of an insidious but patient plot. Hes charged with cruel nocturnal attacks on ponies and cattle, and while we accept his obdurate innocence, we know his faith in English justice is misplaced. Hell be found guilty; hell go to prison for seven years. Why? Because this shaming case really occurred in British history, because Mr. Barnes has rescued it with research and decisive choice. It is his authorial wish to be moved by blunt prejudicethe fear and loathing that are still inspired by dark skins, foreign names and the acquired wariness that sells confectionery, cigarettes and newspapers to the English while waiting for the worst.

Arthur is Arthur Conan Doyle, doctor, cricketer, traveler, journalist, writer, spiritualist and immense, if rather humorless, egotist. Mr. Barnes has fun with Doyles decent pomp, and there are many places where real scholarship merges happily with Mr. Barnes ironic regard for high learning. Yet hes only copying history. Arthur really did come to the rescue of George: He labored to restore the poor mans liberty, all the while demonstrating his own illustrious and benevolent stature. The illustrious benefactor was also gently prompted by the example of George to get on with his own stalled life. Arthur had been married to Touie, a sweet and obedient wife who fell victim to slow consumption. As such, she could not offer much sexual response to Arthurs vigorous self-satisfaction. But then Arthur met Jeanyounger, sexier and so no-stringsattached available as to be a godsend to his social superiority. (Arthur was the kind of master detective in real lifeand the creator of Sherlock Holmes, of coursewho never fathomed how easily his shy subterfuges were noticed in 20 minutes by everyone in his self-announcing orbit.) Georges misfortune prompts Arthur to marry Jean (after Touie has departed) and gets George an invitation to the reception, one dusky face in the crowd. Theres some effort to present George Edalji as a Parsee Midlands Dreyfusnot that his case came close to dismantling corruption and complacency in Britain in the way that Dreyfus affected all of French society. I was more forcefully reminded of the presentation of Coalhouse Walker in Ragtime, though Mr. Doctorows vaulting narrative structure leaves Mr. Barnes seeming a plodder, and Mr. Doctorows wrath at injustice is as violent as the crime itself. In Ragtime, in a shorter span of pages, were driven farther afield in world history. We have the eerie existence of Harry Houdini andif you recallthe haunting proposal that the archduke might yet be saved from gunfire at Sarajevo in June 1914, thus rescuing humanity on the brink of the trenches. Ragtime was inspired, musical, skipping from fiction to history without missing a beat. That nimbleness afforded a rare vision of the harmony of famous and overshadowed lives caught in the same dance. The Barnes of Flauberts Parrot might once have rivaled Ragtimes jazzy daring. But this Barnes has reined himself in, all in the name of gravitas and consequences. Its also sad that Arthur and George are such unarousing characters, dead center in a narrative structure thats obliged to shuttle from one to the other in a steady chronological march. Theres a sense of period, but its the 1890supholstered, sedate, assuredthat we know from Masterpiece Theatre, not the society that was already starting to crack and waiting on the high explosives of 1914-18. And Mr. Barnes doesnt see any way in which his two men are alike, or interchangeablein the beat of ragtime, Mr. Doctorow saw how everyone might be everyone else: Identity was breaking up.-itt is te barom!!!!! Nothing is less rewarding than the labored finale: After Conan Doyles death, theres a lofty sance in the Albert Hall, at which many daft notions culminate in the murmur, He is here! (Arthurs message from the grave?) Theres never a hint that Mr. Barnes believes in this magic. What his novel needsand the same plan applies to the flat equation of George and Arthuris a threat of the irrational, of terror taking hold. In other words, the 20th century. What an ending there might be if Holmes himself, or Holmesian deductive lightning, were suddenly found to be crazed or wrong. But Julian Barnes dodges that moment in a book where hes persuaded himself to sound like Dr. Watson.

Arthur & George Julian Barnes

by Noel Murray January 25, 2006

In 1906, famed mystery writer Arthur Conan Doyle took up the cause of George Edalji, a half-Indian lawyer who'd been falsely accused and convicted of sneaking into his neighbors' fields and mutilating their cattle. The affiliation between the two mena minor part of Doyle's life story and a major part of Edalji'sprompts Julian Barnes' historical novel Arthur & George, though Barnes doesn't bring his protagonists together until around page 225 of a 400-page book. Prior to that, he jumps between their biographies, emphasizing similarities and pointedly noting differences. Both men are lapsed Christians, analytical to a fault, and mutually beholden to a romanticized standard of English propriety, but where Doyle is outgoing, athletic, and imaginative, Edalji is meekly single-minded and befuddled by simple social courtesy. Together, they represent the highest hopes and persistent weaknesses of the British Empire at the dawn of the 20th century. Barnes has a terrific story to tell, and he doesn't muck it up. Adopting a straightforward, slightly formal prose style, Barnes piles up the vignettes and odd details from each man's life, spending more time with each as he goes along, until he comes to a matched set of literary coups: extended back-to-back passages that give first a full account of Edalji's arrest, trial, and incarceration, and then a lengthy spin through Doyle's tricky extramarital romance with the woman who became his second wife. Throughout, Barnes adopts an intimate third-person voice as he shifts from character to characterjust enough to let readers know that not everything is as his dual protagonists believe. Arthur & George sorts through half a dozen recurring themes, from spiritual quests to the way people make their desires known when rigorous codes of behavior get in their way. But mostly, the book is about presumption. As the author of Sherlock Holmes' detective tales, Doyle was known for "beginning with the ending," then making the facts fit his conclusion. In real life, this was exactly what happened to the eccentric-seeming Edalji, whose emotional repression and foreign origins made him suspect from childhood. Even after Doyle rallies to Edalji's aidin concluding chapters as riveting as any forensic mysteryhis deductions rely on the notion that any behavior can look strange out of context. That's what Barnes gets at as well: that everyone's life, examined properly, resolves into an impossible puzzle.

Botching the detectives

Lewis Jones- The Telegraph 12:01AM BST 04 Jul 2005 Lewis Jones reviews Arthur & George by Julian Barnes Like his monster hit Flaubert's Parrot, Julian Barnes's latest novel is an exercise in literary and historical detection. In Arthur & George he investigates the Great Wyrley Outrages of the early 1900s. The story is by any standards a corker. Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, who by now regards Sherlock Holmes as rather an albatross, is approached by the victim of a great injustice. The case arouses his curiosity, for it is a bizarre one, and also his chivalry, so he writes about it in The Daily Telegraph, and even plays detective himself, with the assistance of "Woodie", his factotum and foil. Effortlessly outwitting the oafish police, Sir Arthur solves the mystery, finds the true culprit, exonerates his victim, and rights the wrong. Those are the bones of it, though it is more complicated, and some of the complications make the story more attractive, especially to the modern eye. The Vicar of Wyrley, Staffs, was naturally a member of the Church of England, but he was also a Parsee, from Persia via Bombay. The Rev Shapurji Edalji married an Englishwoman and had children, one of whom, George, became a solicitor. Over a course of years the Edalji family was subjected to an anonymous campaign of abuse, intimidation and slander - hoaxes, letters and so forth. Then the Outrages began. Local farm animals were mutilated at night, there was talk of a gang and George Edalji - absurdly, for he was the mildest and most law-abiding of men, shy and myopic - was framed by the police as the gang's leader, then convicted and sentenced to seven years' penal servitude. He served three. Thanks to Conan Doyle he was granted a pardon, but he received no apology or compensation (apart from 300 raised for him by The Telegraph). Apparently Edalji was innocent yet somehow guilty, and no blame of any kind should have been imputed to Mr Gladstone's Home Office. "The great British solution to everything has been applied," as Sir Arthur fulminates in Barnes's account. "Something terrible has happened, but nobody has done anything wrong." So the story is terrific, but the kindest thing I can say about this novel is that I look forward to the film. I'm sorry, because I've just re-read Flaubert's Parrot, which is as delightful now as it was 21 years ago. It's a rotten joke, but this particular parrot is definitely dead. How can so light and playful a writer have written so dull a book? He might have had such fun. Instead, he plods through rough acres of exposition, editorialising humourlessly as he goes. "But what is the Church threatened by?" asks Arthur, in debate with a friend at his Catholic boarding school. "'It seems strong to me.' 'By science... by the prospect of the 20th century.' 'The 20th century.' Arthur mused on this a moment. 'I cannot think that far. I shall be 40 by the time the next century begins.'"

I say, is that the time? Barnes appears to have been overwhelmed by his research. He does not stint on period flavour, though some of it is distinctly weird ("He is 15 - no, 16 - stone, fit and energetic; and yesterday he discharged into his underlinen"), and one is sometimes inclined to join Sir Arthur in his habitual shout of "Balderdash!" Ignorance of the correct form of address for a knight's wife is hardly shocking in a novelist these days, but there are more egregious errors. As an articled clerk, George is "puzzled" by talk of "betting offices" - and so he might be, since they did not then exist. Barnes is usually a witty, stylish writer, so it is distressing to note such crimes as "violently cudgelled" and "What species of human could wish such an animal harm?" And as Dan Kavanagh he has written some good detective fiction - four novels about Duffy the gay goalie - so again, it is a pity. There is no doubting his sympathy with Doyle, and as a novelist he is bound to identify with him. They are roughly of an age - Barnes now and Doyle at the time - public men, full of honours. Doyle had reluctantly accepted a knighthood, whereas Barnes was appointed Chevalier de l'Ordre des Lettres in 1988, and thence successively Officier in 1995 and Commandeur in 2004. He has little difficulty in imagining Arthur's life as a prosperous Edwardian author, but George is less than convincing, and the Holmesian spirit is altogether lacking. There is a sense of strain and imbalance, and an ominous crunching sound, as of tinny social realism buckling beneath a fairly solid chunk of fictional biography - an overwhelming sensation, to finish the metaphor off entirely, of ill-matched wrestling opponents leaning exhausted on a sadly absent referee. A stray anecdote seemed to me perfectly bathetic: "He had dined with Oscar Wilde, finding him thoroughly civil and agreeable."

A far from elementary novel

Caroline Moore reviews Arthur & George by Julian Barnes.
Caroline Moore- The Telegraph 12:01AM BST 04 Jul 2005 Julian Barnes has managed, in his excellent new novel, to combine potentially incompatible virtues. Arthur & George is a historical novel, drawing upon the once-notorious and still creepily disturbing Great Wyrley Outrages, which began at the end of the 19th century: it is both meticulously researched and vividly imagined, both gripping and thoughtful. It also offers problems for a reviewer: how much should one give away? One of the great pleasures of reviewing is that you can come to a book with unsullied expectations. All fictionreading is a bit like enjoying a detective novel: readers enjoy the process of picking up clues,

guessing the solution (who will prove good or bad, who will be allowed a happy ending by the author); though guessing fictional outcomes - especially cracking murder mysteries - is very different from solving real life crimes. That, indeed, is one of themes of this elegantly intelligent and surprisingly sad novel. Normally, I would be careful not to give away a secret - the historical identity of Arthur - that is not revealed until page 44. In this case, however, the pre-publicity has been such that few potential readers can be unaware that one of the heroes is the creator of Sherlock Holmes, Arthur Conan Doyle, who was moved by generous, crusading pity to try his hand as an amateur detective in a real-life mystery. The novel begins with two small boys, whose surnames are initially deliberately withheld: Arthur, whose first memory is of a corpse, "a white waxen thing"; and George, who, abnormally, has no first memories, even of being "picked up, cuddled, laughed at or chastised". Arthur is morbidly observant, physically exuberant, wildly imaginative, and nurtured on tales of chivalric derring-do; George is shy, earnest, handicapped by acute myopia, and "lacks imagination" to an almost autistic degree. Arthur is brought up in Edinburgh by his Mam - his absent father is a "soft", drunken artist; while the dominant influence in George's life is his father, the high-minded vicar of Great Wyrley, who believes in truth and the British Empire. Barnes has created (or re-created) two splendidly realised and deeply touching central characters, and their tales make compelling reading. What lies behind the antagonism poor little literal-minded George suffers in the classroom of the village school? How will pureminded Arthur, with his old-fashioned idealisation of women, fare when it comes to marriage? The paths of the two boys will not cross until they are grown men, after the outbreak of apparently motiveless malignancy that disrupted Great Wyrley. The Vicarage and its inhabitants were early victims. At first, the incidents seemed merely trivial and inexplicable a stolen key on the doorstep; a milk-churn left with a dead blackbird inside - but soon became more sinister (a garden fork pinning a dead rabbit to the lawn; obscurely threatening letters; a series of hoaxes in the local paper). But as the perpetrations become increasingly gruesome, there is a further twist: George is suspected. This is the tale of how Arthur, now rich, famous, and struggling to live up to his code of honour, tries to save George, now pitifully ensnared in a web of prejudice and surmise. Even if you know the historical outcome (as I did), you will turn the pages with mounting and almost intolerable tension. Barnes has written a novel about essentially good and deeply vulnerable characters: remarkably, he patronises neither them nor their old-fashioned values. His book is partly about the pain and uncertainty that comes with the crumbling of old certainties (belief in orthodox religion, in the Empire, in codes of sexual honour and the impartiality of British justice); but also celebrates human goodness and trust. (trust?!) And in this emotionally and morally subtle novel there is no over-simplistic division between faith in humans and trust in institutions: codes of honour and belief are felt to matter, even if they prove inadequate to deal with the horrifyingly incidental evil that undermines the parish of Great Wyrley.

Michael Dirda- The Washington Post (.com) Sunday, January 15, 2006 ARTHUR & GEORGE A Novel By Julian Barnes Knopf. 386 pp. $24.95 The ampersand in the title gives the first clue. Julian Barnes doesn't call his Booker Prizeshortlisted novel Arthur and George , which distinctly asks us to think of two separate men, but rather Arthur & George , which implies a kind of unity composed of two different elements. Ostensibly an account of how the creator of Sherlock Holmes came to interest himself in a miscarriage of justice, the book is in fact more subtly playful than that, as one would expect from the author of Flaubert's Parrot and Talking it Over . Beneath the appearance of a straightforward historical novel, Barnes develops a double-helix, alternating the storyline between his main narrators, before showing how these two disparate, and desperate, outsiders come to each other's rescue. George Edalji is the son of a Scotswoman and a Parsee convert to Anglicanism who now works as the minister of a country parish. George himself is severely myopic, gentle, unathletic, closely attached to his father and fascinated by the orderliness of the law. Despite occasional taunts about being "colored," he becomes a rising young solicitor specializing in contracts and even writes a monograph on railroad law. He is precise, self-controlled, stolid. Arthur Conan Doyle, by contrast, is of Irish-Catholic extraction and educated in Edinburgh. He takes up medicine as a profession, but when clients prove scarce he turns more and more to writing stories, many of a highly romantic character. After all, he idealizes chivalry, manliness, hearty sports, duty -- in short, honour, with that very upright British "u" in it. One day he imagines a consulting detective named Sheridan Hope, but later alters the man's name to Sherringford Holmes, though that isn't quite right either. Within a few years, Arthur is, after Kipling, the most famous writer in England. What brings this pair together? Throughout George's youth, the Edalji family has suffered from various cruel practical jokes perpetrated by persons unknown. Stolen objects are left on the doorstep. The postman delivers unordered goods. Insulting advertisements appear in the newspaper. But then matters suddenly grow bloody: A valuable horse is left to die after having its underbelly ripped apart by some sharp instrument. As time passes, more animals are mutilated, often when the moon is full. Hints are left that the ripper will soon move on to young women. The police grow convinced that George is responsible. Barnes's account of George's ordeal at the hands of the law he so reveres quickly takes on a harrowing film-noir relentlessness. The chief investigator hates dark-skinned foreigners. Clearly, he decides, these vicious, inhuman atrocities could only be the work of some fanatic without any sense of English decency, probably of mixed blood and consequently half insane. The papers start to describe George as a "typical Oriental," and when this very proper solicitor complains, his attorney points out that "at least they didn't call you inscrutable. Or wily." Still, George firmly believes in English justice and knows he will be acquitted since the evidence against him is at best circumstantial. He is, naturally, found guilty and sentenced to seven years in prison, the first months to be spent in solitary confinement.

Meanwhile, Arthur has married, fathered children, coped with his wife's tuberculosis and settled down in baronial splendor. "If life was a chivalric quest," Barnes writes, "then he had rescued the fair Touie [his wife], he had conquered the city, and been rewarded with gold. But there were years to go before he was prepared to accept a role as wise elder to the tribe. What did a knight errant do when he came home to a wife and two children in South Norwood?" What he does is fall in love with another woman. In his late thirties, Arthur meets the 21-year-old Jean Leckie, she flirts with him, he is smitten and the two soon confess their undying devotion to each other. But what now? "It is impossible for him not to love Jean; and for her not to love him. It is impossible for him to divorce Touie, the mother of his children, whom he still regards with affection and respect; besides, only a cad would abandon an invalid. Finally, it is impossible to turn the affair into an intrigue by making Jean his mistress. Each of the three parties has his or her honour, even if Touie does not know hers is being considered in absentia . For that is an essential condition: Touie must not know." Barnes spends the central portion of his novel on Arthur's tormenting ethical dilemma. For a man of character, the problem is, after all, fundamentally insoluble. So Arthur determines that his love for Jean will remain platonic, throws himself into work and his growing interest in spiritualism, behaves impeccably with Touie. Months, then years pass. Arthur finally admits to himself -- in a devastating sentence -- that "he has loved [his wife] as best a man can, given that he did not love her." "There is no way out," Arthur realizes. "That is the beastliness of his position; or rather, each beckoning exit is marked Misery. In Lasker's Chess Magazine he reads of a position called Zugzwang , in which the player is unable to move any piece in any direction to any square without making his already imperiled state worse. This is what Arthur's life feels like." And then, after nearly 10 years in which he has loved Jean and lived a lie, Arthur learns about George Edalji. The obvious miscarriage of justice galvanizes the knight-errant. Since the public identifies him with Sherlock Holmes, he will act as his burdensome creation would and clear the innocent and unmask the guilty. Since Arthur & George is based on a true incident, many Baker Street fans will know the course and outcome of the investigations. But I won't say more about them here. More to the point, Barnes's artistry underscores that these two proper gentlemen are both, in fact, victimized by the systems they admire most -- the law and chivalry. Together, they are nonetheless able to redeem lives wracked by hopelessness and frustration. Barnes's writing is, as usual, masterly throughout Arthur & George , not only as the pages shift from one man's consciousness to the other's but also in the way their author keeps the reader on edge. Facts are interpreted, then reinterpreted; the bigoted speak convincingly; nothing turns out quite as expected; and even the book's coda delivers a final shock. Most of all, though, Barnes knows how to control readers' reactions, making us sicken as the Ripper reaches inside his jacket, feel horrified and indignant during George's show trial, suffer with Arthur in his attempts to remain an honorable man while still desiring a woman not his wife. There's an occasional bit of Sherlockiana -- despair is likened to the treacherous

Grimpen Mire -- and even some neat, low-keyed humor. Arthur travels to meet George's parents and sister Maud: "The family was glad of his arrival, but not effusive; conscious of his fame, yet not overawed. He was relieved for once to find himself in the presence of three people, none of whom, he was prepared to wager, had ever read a single one of his books." In the novel's final pages, Arthur has matured into a convinced spiritualist, to the dismay of most of his admirers then and now. Yet Barnes's novel allows us to better understand why and how this may have come about. Still, I like best George's simple and down-to-earth -- indeed, rather English -- view of religion: "He went to church because it gave Maud pleasure that he did so. As far as the afterlife went, he thought he would wait and see."

Of love and sleuthing

By The Washington Times Saturday, January 14, 2006 ARTHUR & GEORGE By Julian Barnes Knopf, $24.95, 385 pages Once again, and splendidly, Julian Barnes turns to the life of a great writer to shape a novel. The Arthur of Arthur and George, is the toweringly humane Sir Arthur Conan Doyle. The George is one George Edalji, a dark-skinned solicitor who, in 1903, was falsely accused of a series of horrendous animal slashings in a farming village north of Staffordshire. Using letters and newspapers of the time, government reports and court proceedings along with Conan Doyles own writings, Mr. Barnes imagines the meeting of these two very different men. Traversing the darkest sides of human nature, he builds a tale that marries the elements of a good detective story with a more human story. Conan Doyle is the chief beneficiary in all this, emerging here as a faithful husband, an enthusiastic lover and a protector of the downtrodden. This is a work of historical fiction, and fans of the highly inventive Flauberts Parrot will no doubt miss some of the experimental bravura of that earlier work. Nevertheless, while this book is attentive to the historical facts of events and, some would argue, gets bogged down in them it manages to intrigue and delight at a steady clip. Moreover it revisits an injustice that more than deserves a second look. Like a good detective story the book opens ominously, describing a small boys encounter with a corpse. That small boy is a dutiful young Arthur who the narrator suspects has been subjected to a cold dose of reality, starting with a door has been purposefully left ajar. The omniscient narrator observes, There might have been a desire to impress upon the child the horror of death; or more optimistically, to show him that death was nothing to be feared.

Grandmothers soul had clearly flown up to Heaven, leaving behind only the sloughed husk of her body. The boy wants to see? Then let the boy see. Though George does not have a first memory as vivid as Arthurs, as the son of vicar, he early on learns the rules. [H]e is expected to tell the truth because at the Vicarage no alternative exists. I am the way, the truth and the life: he is to hear this many times on his fathers lips. The way, the truth and the life. You go on your way through life telling the truth. George knows that this is not what the Bible means, but as he grows up this is how the words sound to him. And so each of the boys grow, the first into a beloved son and brother who does well in medical school, takes a wife and becomes, first, a famous writer then a knight. And all the while the second, who hails from a mixed race heritage (his mother is Scottish, and his father an Indian), steadily commits himself to doing well at school, looking after his younger siblings and no running afoul of his very stern father, the highly regarded Vicar of Wyrley. And so the book proceeds with a long run-up to the central action of the novel, which amounts to, first, the persecution of Georges family through threatening letters on to Georges arrest for the mysterious mutilation of horses on farms near the vicarage. As Georges life is depicted taking an unfair, long spiral-down trajectory, Arthurs life seems to move from success to success until his beloved wife Touie is stricken with consumption. At that point, the gallant Arthur is forced to become a caregiver and he does so with utmost gentleness. Before long, he finds love, but because an infidelity is out of the question he must make sure that even his chaste visits with the younger Jean give no one pause. A number of questions are raised in the book. Who sent the threatening letters to the vicarage? Who killed the animals? Why was George arrested? Worse, how did he come to be found guilty? Why, in spite of horse maimings after Georges imprisonment, was he not released? How did Conan Doyle come to be involved? Did he help? Was George truly vindicated? Did the solicitor find peace in his life? How did things turn out for Conan Doyle? For the most part, the book is sustained by the rhythm of crime and courtroom, with justice given its due, however belatedly. Apart from the questions central to the books subject Mr. Barnes has his characters debate everything from golf to religion to marriage. This is a richly textured book that above all else provides hours of reading pleasure. Of lingering questions, perhaps only Conan Doyles interest in spiritualism, here given some attention, never quite squares with the utterly rational side of his life. In the end, it is George who, perhaps, evokes a readers greater sympathies. After he is released from prison and he has his life back he tries to make sense of it. From villain to martyr to nobody very much was this not unfair? His supporters had assured him that his case was as significant as that of Dreyfus, that it revealed as much about England as the Frenchmans did about France, and just as there had been Dreyfusards and anti-Dreyfusards so were those for and against Edalji. But in the end once more, it is Conan Doyle who readers are reminded is the hero. For in Sir Arthur Conan Doyle [George] had as great a defender, and a better writer, than the Frenchman

Emile Zola, whose books were reportedly vulgar and who had to run away to England when threatened in his turn with gaol. Julian Barnes is, no doubt, in very good company. With the sensitivity reminiscent of the stories in his collection The Lemon Tree, Mr. Barnes proves again an able guide to the ironies of mortality.

Unlikely friends
Mining the life of Arthur Conan Doyle, Julian Barnes replays history with novel results
By Gail Caldwell | January 15, 2006 - The Boston Globe Arthur & George By Julian Barnes Knopf, 386 pp., $24.95 History can be a mixed blessing for the novelist: an elixir of possibility or a wildebeest that keeps hogging the stage. If you insist on returning to the archives of reality to tether and justify your plot, you can't avoid two glaringly connected facts: The story you seek to fictionalize -- to elevate, tinker with, reinterpret -- has already happened. And if you're going to use the past, you must respect its scaffolding of truth, so anything you try to do with your twice-told tale will be both beholden to history and imprisoned by it. 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. The most elegant part of the novel occurs in its beginning chapters, when we meet the boy who will go on to invent Sherlock Holmes, and the young fellow in Staffordshire who will share the title of Barnes's novel. While Doyle (of Irish and Scottish descent) is growing up in Edinburgh, George lives with his family in the vicarage in a village called Great Wyrley. He

is shy and studious, modeling his beliefs on his parents' beloved Church of England. He does not make friends easily -- ''you're not a right sort," one troublemaker whispers to him in the schoolyard -- and he has trouble seeing the blackboard. Still, George does all right -- he loves his sister Maud, loves the truth of books, has his heart set on studying the law. And then, when he is 16, a series of hoaxes begin to infect Great Wyrley -- first pranks, then threatening letters. When the local police come to investigate, it is George to whom they turn. They tell him to state his last name. ''You know my surname," George says politely. ''It's the same as my father's. And my mother's." The sergeant presses him, until he replies. ''Edalji." ''Ah, yes," says the menacing Sergeant. ''Now I think you'd better spell that out for me." Thus it is that in a few sentences, we realize that the George we've been imagining, the upright C of E vicar's son, is the child of an Indian (Parsee) father and Scottish mother. Not a right sort, indeed: The strangeness he's been accused of throughout his childhood has to do with his brown skin. In this exquisitely well-timed delivery of George Edalji, Barnes has borrowed from Doyle's genius in constructing his Holmesian universe: It's not just what you tell the reader, but when and in what context. So begins the sickening downfall of a proper young man, felled by anonymous hatred and the lackluster and racist iniquity of the townfolk. When the meanness targeting George escalates and expands to accusations of animal mutilation, he is railroaded into a seven-year prison term. He manages to survive jail with the same inner resources he used to counter bullies and despair, and in three years he is set free. His release happens without much reason, fuss, or publicity, which is the way proper England tends to its improper dust piles of injustice. While the dignified half-Parsee was falling through the space created by England's provincial cruelties, Arthur the boy has been becoming Arthur the bon vivant. The oldest son of an alcoholic father, he takes shelter in the imagination, first glimpsed when his Mam regales him with fabulous tales in the kitchen. Eschewing his first love for a more pragmatic one, Arthur chooses to study medicine, but his languishing ophthalmology practice allows him to write detective stories during off hours. He marries properly and with some luck: Touie is a longsuffering woman who bears his children and his moods, then even harder tests as the years go by. Barnes's depiction of both his characters -- one the somber, fastidious law student, the other a roguish and irrepressible Scotsman -- is elaborately constructed; by the time they meet, more than halfway through the novel, we sense that one will save the other. Not just that Doyle, by now a celebrated novelist with an international reputation, will save the forgotten lawyerturned-prisoner. But that -- more poignant, perhaps more important -- George Edalji, with his circumspect ways and unimpeachable character, will manage to save Arthur. When Arthur first gets wind of the outrage committed against George, he flies into action. So ''Arthur & George" soon takes on the sheen and momentum of an Arthur Conan Doyle detective story, replete with who-might-have-dunits and breathtaking moments of hope and desolation in the quest to restore George's reputation. The novel possesses a narrative intelligence that fleshes out its plot with psychological acuity: Arthur knows, for instance, when faced with the opportunity of having what he has long craved -- a legitimate relationship with a woman other than his wife -- that getting what you thought you had to have is

dangerous business: ''wanting the impossible canonizes the wanting." Barnes tosses off such wisdoms with dazzling aplomb, but they have a tendency to get lost in all the material he couldn't bear to omit. Doyle's spiritualist period, the possible guilt and innocence of every scalawag within range of Great Wyrley, even George's treatise on railway law -- all are thrown into the teeming mix with exuberant good cheer. What with less usually being more, I wearied of Barnes the historian. The indelible portrait he delivers of George Edalji is worth a score of authentic newspaper headlines from the day. Still, ''Arthur & George" will greatly please those who want a Dickensian sprawl of a novel with one or two heroes and a sometimes thrilling story line. And its capture of the bitter realities of a lily-white English village -- the message of which, Arthur considers, is that ''I and my kind own the land around here, and the people, and the justice" -- suggests a myopia of the heart that George himself, nearsighted saint, will never have to bear.

A true case of injustice / Julian Barnes weaves an Edwardian outrage into a Holmesian search for beginnings, endings, truth
Reviewed by Heller McAlpin - SFGate- San Fransisco Chronicle Published 4:00 am, Sunday, January 29, 2006

Arthur & George By Julian Barnes KNOPF; 388 PAGES; $24.95

Julian Barnes is a suave and polished stylist who has been called the "chameleon of British letters" for the sheer versatility of his output. His 10th novel, "Arthur & George," is an elegantly constructed historical story about an egregious miscarriage of justice involving racial prejudice. From the first chapter, Barnes has us in his thrall, contrasting the hyper-civilized Edwardian world of duty and propriety with various sources of social shame. He rescues this early 20th century English legal case from obscurity, drawing somewhat attenuated parallels to France's Alfred Dreyfus affair while addressing broader themes of mortality, guilt and narrative structure.

Arthur is Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, the athletic, gregarious creator of Sherlock Holmes. George is George Edalji, a meek, severely myopic, straitlaced English solicitor of half-Parsi extraction who was wrongfully convicted of a series of horse mutilations called the Great Wyrley Outrages that rocked the farming and mining county of Staffordshire in 1903. Edalji's eventual vindication with Conan Doyle's help led to the first British Court of Criminal Appeal. Barnes' novel contains as many facets as a well-cut diamond: biographies of Barnes' two eponymous protagonists, a wonderful study in contrasts; a dark, blood-boiling story of xenophobia, scapegoating and persecution; a courtroom drama; a love story; a history of spiritualism's unlikely rise from rationalist roots; and a vivid portrait of Edwardian England.

Barnes paints Arthur and George's alternating histories from their earliest memories through young adulthood in measured strokes, only gradually revealing their full identities. Arthur grows up in genteel poverty in Edinburgh. His father "was good at engendering children" but not much else, a sentimental drunk eventually institutionalized for what was euphemistically called epilepsy. His dynamic mother entertains her brood with fabulous tales of knights and fairies while stirring their porridge. When Arthur is sent away at 7 to a boarding school run by Dutch Jesuits, he gains popularity through his own storytelling. Barnes comments wryly, "Thus he discovered the essential connection between narrative and reward." George endures a joyless childhood as the "half-caste" son of a Scottish mother and the Rev. Shapurju Edalji, the vicar of Great Wyrley, who never so much converses with his elder son as he grills him with pointed catechisms. George is a studious, humorless boy for whom law becomes his great love, a love whose betrayal hurts more than the escalating persecution he suffers at the hands of ignorant people. Arthur's and George's paths finally cross with a sense of inevitability more than 200 pages into the novel. Arthur is drawn to George not just by a sense of outrage and intrigue but also because he feels they are both outsiders, "unofficial Englishmen." Although trained as an ophthalmologist, Arthur is by then famous for the "consulting detective whose popularity had begun to embarrass and even disgust his creator." An energetic man, he throws himself into George's case with the determined combination of "intense observation followed by rigorous deduction" that he believed "was the key to criminal as well as medical diagnosis." Barnes considered titling his new novel "Conviction" but decided that was too similar to Ian McEwan's "Atonement." A pity, for "Arthur & George" is in fact about various convictions, including George's wrongful one and Arthur's strongly held belief that our spirits live on after our bodies die -- "that death is not a door closed in our face, but a door left ajar." Conan Doyle, the "St. Paul of Spiritualism," was a prominent member of England's Psychical Research Society. Barnes shows him at his most sexist and pedantic, a product of his time, expounding his unorthodox views on the afterlife to his great love, Jean Leckie, whom he met, to his extreme moral consternation, while he was still married to his invalid first wife. When he asks, "And what is the point of life unless you know what happens afterwards? How can you make sense of the beginning if you don't know what the ending is?" he raises issues not just about faith but also about literary structure. Barnes, like the master of the mot juste and subject of his brilliant 1984 novel, "Flaubert's Parrot," writes with subtlety and delicious precision. Conan Doyle, whom no one would put on a literary par with Flaubert or Barnes, reportedly always began his novels knowing where he was going -- if not how he was going to get there. He approaches George's case the same way. But as the chief constable of Staffordshire counters, "You cannot understand the ending until you know the beginning." Playing on these themes, Barnes divides "Arthur & George" into four sections: Beginnings, Beginning With an Ending, Ending With a Beginning and Endings. Love, death and mortal dread have been perennial Barnes subjects, and they come together in the story of Arthur's second marriage and his passion for spiritualism. In Barnes' previous novel, "Love, Etc.," his sequel to "Talking It Over," one of the three characters caught in a

mutating love triangle reminds us that "in life, every ending is just the start of another story." Readers will be happy to know that Barnes brings "Arthur & George" to a full, if ironic, stop - at once Edwardian, post-postmodern and deeply satisfying.

'Arthur & George' by Julian Barnes Sherlock who? Doyle's greatest case inspires Barnes' fine novel Sunday, February 05, 2006- post-gazetta.com (Pittsburgh Post-Gazette) By Sharon Dilworth Arthur and George grow up in late Victorian England. One is a curious and imaginative child who awaits the wonders of the world without ever considering its limitations. The other is the quiet, reserved son of a village vicar who seems bound by life's restrictions before experiencing happiness. Arthur will become one of the world's best-known writers while George, after modest success as a solicitor, will be convicted of maiming farm animals in 1903. Geographically close, their personal experiences and desires will separate them into different worlds until George's case brings them together later in life. Short-listed for the 2005 Man Booker Prize, Julian Barnes' meditative and elegant novel is filled with compelling fictional portraits of Arthur Conan Doyle and George Edalji. Like a well-crafted whodunit, the case's clues are laid out skillfully. The novel begins with a series of alternating biographies in which we learn that George is the son of an Indian father and a Scottish mother, who, faced with the malice of his classmates, will naively deny that race has anything to do with their harassment. He wants a useful and English life. Respecting authority and enjoying order, he becomes a solicitor and envisions himself getting married one day, even though he cannot fathom how one meets a prospective wife. The proudest day of his life is when he publishes a law document about the British railroad, a system he admires for its precision. He continues to sleep in the same room with his father, just as he did as a child. Arthur, a Scot, is both enamored and disappointed by the virtue of English chivalry. For him, King Arthur and the Knights of the Round Table are an ideal, though it pains him that the age of chivalry has ended. He likes to perform, taking on different voices and the whimsy of being someone else, and publishes short stories. Like all things, literary fame comes to him without much struggle. Arthur is knighted, and his fictional character's fame will eventually rival his own celebrity status.

Knowing that an errant knight is an oxymoron, he vows fidelity to his ill wife while engaging in a serious but chaste affair. Barnes expertly examines these two men, shaving down the spectacle of their lives until he reveals the very core of their being. George is awkward, bewildered and confused as he is betrayed by the authority he respects because of its very essence -- its very Englishness. Arthur also believes in the fairness of his society and operates with the pure conviction that his involvement in the affair will win George a pardon and save him from further disgrace. In much the same manner that Emile Zola's "J'accuse" publicized the anti-Semitism behind the Dreyfus affair when a French soldier was accused of spying for the Germans and sentenced to life imprisonment on Devil's Island, Arthur's determined intervention in George's case will reveal a racist and lazy police force. Like his fictional hero Sherlock Holmes, Doyle combs through the case, re-interviewing witnesses, finding new clues, and new information, finally giving George a defense. Unlike what happened in France, where the Dreyfus affair caused scandal and reform in the French government, the outcome in this case was typically British and therefore subdued. Though pardoned, George is never officially pronounced innocent nor does he receive government compensation for its miscarriage of justice. However, thanks to Arthur's involvement, the British established a court of appeals. "England was a quieter place, just as principled, but less keen on making a fuss about its principles; a place where people got on with their own business and did not seek to interfere with that of others; where great public eruptions took place from time to time, eruptions of feeling which might even tip over into violence and injustice, but which soon faded in the memory, and were rarely built into the history of the country." This is a beguiling and moving novel. Employing rich historical detail, Barnes masters the gravity of loss and longing that each man experiences. His portraits paint a real sense of lives lived. Barnes succeeds in re-creating a compelling early 20th-century dilemma but rather than focusing on the crime or the mishandling of justice, he moves into the minds of these men -one famous, the other obscure -- both threatened by a prejudiced authority. The country's attitude to the false conviction revealed a society that had no core dedication to truth, which unfortunately sounds all too familiar today. First published on February 5, 2006 at 12:00 am Sharon Dilworth is a writer and professor of writing at Carnegie Mellon University. Read more: http://old.post-gazette.com/pg/06036/649056.stm#ixzz2jFR7hvO5

Hello to all that

Julian Barness Arthur & George By DANA KLETTER | January 25, 2006 - The Phoenix In a time of tenuous allegiances and deep culture clashes, Julian Barness new novel asks, What determines nationality? What does it mean to be included, to be excluded? Set in Late Victorian England and based on a true story, Arthur & George alternates sections headed Arthur Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, creator of the iconic Sherlock Holmes and George, a Staffordshire solicitor whose tidy, provincial existence is disrupted when hes accused of hideous crimes. Arthurs life begins in Dickensian dysfunction, with a weak-willed, artistic, alcoholic father who keeps his family in poverty and a strong, wise mother whose tales of Round Table knights and the familys glorious history inspire her son. When wealthy relatives offer to send Arthur to Jesuit boarding school, the Mam, an expert in all matters, from underclothing to hellfire, advises him, Wear flannel next to your skin . . . and never believe in eternal punishment. George Edjali grows up in the claustrophobic Wryley vicarage, dominated by his fathers severe Anglican beliefs. His mothers stories are mostly about burning in Hell, but just as troubling are the random parables, like puzzles with no logic to them. Equally random is Georges abuse at the hands of stupid farm boys and odd-talking miners sons. Half-Indian, dark-skinned, myopic, he cant see that racism drives his torment. Arthur becomes a devotee of the British cult of Manliness; hearty, cricket-ball whacking, honor-bound to a mythical chivalry. He trains as a doctor but makes a better living as a writer. With his Sherlock Homes money, he rescues many damsels his mother and sisters from squalor, his wife from tragic family circumstances. George trains for the law. Conscientious, teetotaling, repressed, he finds pleasure in the punctuality of suburban commuter trains. He dreams of the day he has all of a British solicitors accouterments good watch fob, respectable umbrella, partners who hail him as Good Old George when he picks up the lunch tab. When the Edjalis become the object of a vicious campaign of harassment, they respond with decent English outrage. When George is accused of animal mutilation and attempted murder, he expects the justice any Englishman deserves. Instead, on scant evidence, hes found guilt y. The separate narratives meet when Arthur sweeps in with great Holmesian flourishes to clear his character. Arthur & George is Barness ode to Britain, in the time between the waning of the Empire and the trenches of the Somme. He devises a thoroughly national language that takes in Kiplings florid prose, Gilbert & Sullivans lilt, Mrs. Gaskells delicacy, and Elgars pomp, merging elements of the Victorian thriller and romance to tell a whopping good tale.

But Arthur & George also examines what it means to be English. Arthur, a national hero but an admitted unofficial Englishman, Irish, Scottish, and a papist, has no more actual claim to Englishness than George, the son of a Parsee from Bombay and a Scottish vicars daughter. Despite Arthurs improper love for another woman and his obsession with spiritualism, his white complexion and beef-eating vigor make him acceptable, included. George, with his prim fascination for the arcana of British railway law and refusal to believe that race is the source of his persecution, is excluded. And justice is denied by a real Englishman, Colonel Anson, who believes that despite his ostensible decency, George yields to something barbaric, something buried deep within his dark soul. Arthur & George is fun, engaging, humane, and unlike any novel Julian Barnes has written. Read more: http://thephoenix.com/boston/arts/2241-arthur-and-george/#ixzz2jFS1ys6X