{"id":9467,"date":"2022-06-06T08:00:00","date_gmt":"2022-06-06T12:00:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/meadowparty.com\/blog\/?p=9467"},"modified":"2022-06-05T18:07:11","modified_gmt":"2022-06-05T22:07:11","slug":"arthur-and-george","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/meadowparty.com\/blog\/2022\/06\/06\/arthur-and-george\/","title":{"rendered":"Arthur and George."},"content":{"rendered":"\n

Julian Barnes\u2019 The Sense of an Ending<\/a><\/em> is one of my favorite novels of this century, and was adapted into a solid if very understated (or just very English) film<\/a> a few years ago, so I\u2019m likely to pick up any book of his I find lying around. Arthur & George<\/a><\/em> precedes that book in Barnes\u2019 bibliography, making the Booker Prize shortlist in 2005, six years before he won the honor for Sense<\/em>. It\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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 \u201cGreat Wyrley Outrages.\u201d Edalji\u2019s family had been harassed for years via letters and malicious pranks \u2013 thank goodness SWATting wasn\u2019t a thing in the 1890s, as their tormentors would certainly have done it \u2013 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\u2019s innocence and campaign for a pardon, which he achieved after eight months of \u201cdetective\u201d work of his own.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The novel follows the lives of the two men, starting in childhood, with brief sections on their upbringings (collected as \u201cBeginnings\u201d), followed by a long exposition of Edalji\u2019s story (\u201cBeginnings with an Ending\u201d), then one on Sir Conan Doyle\u2019s efforts to clear George\u2019s name (\u201cEndings with a Beginning\u201d), 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\u2019s sort of where Barnes gets into trouble, as we get way too much of Conan Doyle\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n\n <\/script> \n \n\n\n\n

Barnes tries to weave Conan Doyle\u2019s 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\u2019s investigations have far more narrative greed and greater tension than his love life or his weird dalliances with superstition. There\u2019s just nothing that interesting about his platonic friendship with Jean; their meetings are fraught with whatever the opposite of tension is. They\u2019re flaccid. I couldn\u2019t wait for any scene involving the two of them or spiritualism to be over with, so Barnes could get back to the good stuff \u2013 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\u2019s through.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Fortunately for Arthur & George<\/em>, there\u2019s 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 \u2013 he claimed another boy committed the crimes, but his case was just as circumstantial as the one that got Edalji convicted. It\u2019s not in the same league as The Sense of an Ending<\/em>, 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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Next up: I\u2019m reading this year\u2019s Pulitzer Prize for Fiction winner, The Netanyahus<\/a><\/em>, by Joshua Cohen.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Julian Barnes\u2019 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\u2019m likely to pick up any book of his I find lying around. Arthur & George precedes that book in […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[66,162,470],"class_list":["post-9467","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized","tag-british-literature","tag-historical-fiction","tag-historical-novels","entry"],"amp_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/meadowparty.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9467","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/meadowparty.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/meadowparty.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/meadowparty.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/meadowparty.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=9467"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/meadowparty.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9467\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":9468,"href":"https:\/\/meadowparty.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9467\/revisions\/9468"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/meadowparty.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=9467"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/meadowparty.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=9467"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/meadowparty.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=9467"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}