BOOK REVIEW: Arthur & George by Julian Barnes

 I love Julian Barnes’ writing. I’m trying to work my way through his backlist and just finished Arthur & George. In his usual beautiful style, Barnes gives us dual biographies of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle and George Edalji.

Doyle is, of course, the creator of Sherlock Holmes. He was also wrote historical fiction, science fiction, plays, poetry – you name it. The novel starts with Doyle’s earliest memory and takes us through his difficult youth, early career in medicine, marriage to his first wife, and his meteoric rise to fame with his Sherlock Holmes stories. It continues through his disenchantment with Sherlock and his falling in love with a young woman with whom he carries on a platonic romance until the death of his wife from consumption many years later. And then he meets George.

In alternating chapters, we meet Edalji, whose story is also told from childhood through adulthood. The son of an Englishwoman and a vicar who converted to Christianity but who was originally a Parsi from Bombay, Edalji was a studious child who grew up to be a modestly successful solicitor. But his background is strange. As a child, he was involved as his family was persecuted with anonymous, often threatening letters, which brought in the local police, who suspected him as the culprit. The letters stopped abruptly, but started up again at the same time as a series of animal mutilations in his locale. Again, police were involved and they looked for reasons to blame him. He was arrested, tried, and sentenced to seven years hard labor.

Doyle and Edalji meet after Edalji is released (after three years) but not pardoned. Doyle takes up his case as a gross miscarriage of justice.

The novel is based on true events. It’s a provoking tale and racial prejudice is almost certainly to blame for the Edalji’s persecution, though George doesn’t think this is the case.

Barnes does a superb job of presenting the complexities and the ambiguities of the story. The evidence against Edalji is all circumstantial, but at times it does seem compelling. As does the case Doyle tries to build against a different suspect. It’s George, not Arthur, who wants to give the other suspect the benefit of the doubt, and this makes the reader see, too, how easy it is to be misled.

The biographies continue on to Doyle’s death (after his second marriage and his evangelizing for spiritualism) and Edalji’s dealing with the aftermath of notoriety followed by relative obscurity. 

Barnes climbs inside the heads of these two very different men so convincingly that, despite some areas of slow pacing, I could not put the book down.

For fans of literary biographical fiction, this book is highly recommended.