Julian Barnes’ The Sense of an Ending is one of my favorite novels of this century, and was adapted into a solid if very understated (or just very English) film a few years ago, so I’m likely to pick up any book of his I find lying around. Arthur & George precedes that book in Barnes’ bibliography, making the Booker Prize shortlist in 2005, six years before he won the honor for Sense. It’s a beautifully written fictionalization of a true story involving Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, but lacks the tension and conciseness that made his subsequent book such a standout.
The Arthur of the title is the author who created Sherlock Holmes, while George is George Edalji, a bookish, half-Indian lawyer who was wrongly accused of a series of animal murders known now as the “Great Wyrley Outrages.” Edalji’s family had been harassed for years via letters and malicious pranks – thank goodness SWATting wasn’t a thing in the 1890s, as their tormentors would certainly have done it – while the local constables did nothing to stop the harassment, often intimating that George was the culprit in his own abuse. He was convicted on circumstantial evidence, boosted by prejudice and prosecutorial misconduct, and later released from prison without explanation or pardon. He wrote to Conan Doyle, who took it upon himself to prove Edalji’s innocence and campaign for a pardon, which he achieved after eight months of “detective” work of his own.
The novel follows the lives of the two men, starting in childhood, with brief sections on their upbringings (collected as “Beginnings”), followed by a long exposition of Edalji’s story (“Beginnings with an Ending”), then one on Sir Conan Doyle’s efforts to clear George’s name (“Endings with a Beginning”), before wrapping things up in a section whose title you can probably guess. The two middle sections constitute the bulk of the book, and that’s sort of where Barnes gets into trouble, as we get way too much of Conan Doyle’s personal life. His first wife was not a great match for him, and she spent the last several years of her life with tuberculosis. While still married, he met Jean Leckie, who would become his second wife after they maintained a chaste relationship for nearly a decade while, in effect, waiting for his first wife to die. Meanwhile, he also dabbled in spiritualism, his interest in (and gullibility towards) which only increased after his son died of wounds he suffered in the Battle of the Sonne.
Barnes tries to weave Conan Doyle’s personal life into the mystery around Edalji and the Outrages, but the former simply cannot compete with the latter: The crimes, trial, and Conan Doyle’s investigations have far more narrative greed and greater tension than his love life or his weird dalliances with superstition. There’s just nothing that interesting about his platonic friendship with Jean; their meetings are fraught with whatever the opposite of tension is. They’re flaccid. I couldn’t wait for any scene involving the two of them or spiritualism to be over with, so Barnes could get back to the good stuff – anything around Edalji, whether it was the harassment campaign, the accusations, the trial, or the investigation to clear his name. Those passages are electric, and if Barnes wanted to stop writing serious fiction at age 76, he could probably crank out of a couple of good detective novels before he’s through.
Fortunately for Arthur & George, there’s enough of the mystery to make up for the weakness of the other material, and Barnes makes it work without changing any of the substance of the real-world case, even where it makes Conan Doyle look like a bit of a hypocrite – he claimed another boy committed the crimes, but his case was just as circumstantial as the one that got Edalji convicted. It’s not in the same league as The Sense of an Ending, which was taut and focused, yet landed such a massive impact with its resolution, with the same clear and evocative prose, but good enough to get over the recommended line for me.
Next up: I’m reading this year’s Pulitzer Prize for Fiction winner, The Netanyahus, by Joshua Cohen.
I enjoyed this book. I’m not sure where I would rank it in JB’s cannon, however. Some of his earlier stuff gets bogged down with details or historical facts. I do also like his short fiction. I feel like there has been a distinct shift in his writing since he lost his wife.
Haven’t read any Barnes, but just added Sense of an Ending to my queue. It’s nice to have good short novels to slot in between the hefty ones.
Also, given your sense of humor, I can’t tell if the line about Barnes writing detective fiction is a joke or not–because he really did publish a series of crime/detective novels under the pseudonym Dan Kavanagh back in the ’80s starring Duffy, “a bisexual private detective and ex-policeman with a ‘phobia of ticking watches and a penchant for Tupperware'” https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Duffy_(novel)
I had no idea! Definitely will keep an eye out for those. I just look under Barnes in bookstores and had never thought about a pseudonym, even though John Banville has done the same thing.
I thought I was a reasonably big fan of Barnes and had no idea about the pseudonymous detective novels. Thanks for the tip. It does remind me of Banville as Keith says.