Arthur and George

This book by Julian Barnes is based on turn of last century crime featuring Arthur Conan Doyle and his fighting for a man innocent of crime, George Edalji. Julian Barnes is an outstanding artist who can turn a novel into a history lesson and this one becomes almost real life. Though the novel has a leasurely pace with a lot of conversation showing the same type of writing as then, it is very different from the author's usual crisp writing and a marked difference at that. The novel is partly from one person's point of view and partly from the other's. The book describes in detail the costumes, conversations and locations of those times. The novel is very different from his earlier one, Flaubert's Parrot, written so long ago. Though the novel is long, it does not feel slow. It makes us sympathize with the victim and feel glad that Sir Arthur takes up his case. Like all Sherlock Holmes like cases, we look forward to a dramatic closure. Though it reads like detective fiction at times, there are loose ends which make us feel differently. The case makes us reflect on reality too as the victim is part Indian, so the racism creeps into the case. Just as the Alfred Dreyfus case in France happened about the same time, with the ant-semitism, the victim wonders why his case did not achieve the same fame or notoriety. The book gives a good deal about the English of those days, their feelings and a lot about the biographical details of Arthur. It is a pleasure to read the book as it is different from the others. The readers might be challenged by the pace of the book though. Barnes is not straightforward in pointing the facts of the case, which might perturb some readers. I personally loved the writing, it is wonderfully protrayed and anyone who loves the writing of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle will love it. Arthur and George grow up worlds apart in late nineteenth-century Britain: Arthur in shabby-genteel Edinburgh, George in the vicarage of a small Staffordshire village. Arthur becomes a doctor, then a writer; George a solicitor in Birmingham. Arthur is to become one of the most famous men of his age, while George remains in hard-working obscurity. But as the new century begins, they are brought together by a sequence of events that made sensational headlines at the time as The Great Wyrley Outrages. With a mixture of intense research and vivid imagination, Julian Barnes brings to life not just this long-forgotten case, but the inner workings of these two very different men. This is a novel in which teh events of a hundred years ago constantly set off contemporary echoes, a novel about low crime and high spirituality, guilt and innocence, identity, nationality and race.