Arthur & George – Julian Barnes

This story is about many things. It is about a miscarriage of justice. It is about relationships. It is about a crime mystery. It is about what society expects of us. It is about national identity. And, yes, it is about two people named Arthur and George. At its core, however, it is about judgement. Elbert Hubbard once said, “Many a man's reputation would not know his character if they met on the street.” The judgements made about us by others, and vice versa, scarcely coincide with who we and they actually are. Indeed, sometimes, even the judgements we make about ourselves turn out to be incorrect.

And so it is with Arthur & George.

Arthur is Sir Arthur Conan Doyle – wildly popular author, Knight of the Realm, hobnobber amongst the rich and famous, and, of course, creator of Sherlock Holmes. That, at least, is what the world outside sees, and that is all they see. That he is also just a man is a notion that doesn’t even register on Society’s radar. He couldn’t possibly be anything as mundane as a father, brother, husband and son. What the world doesn’t see is his struggle with his conscience, as he fights to remain physically faithful to his dying wife, even as he has fallen utterly in love with another woman. What it doesn’t see is that he feels shackled and burdened by his own creation, and wants to be rid of the troublesome Mr. Holmes. What it doesn’t see is how a man who has invented such a rational being can himself be so irrational as to believe the spirits of the dead can communicate with the living.

George is George Edalji – a name that would be known only to the most ardent Conan Doyle or Holmes fans, or the most dedicated law historian. To the outside world, he is an outsider – the son of a Scottish mother and Parsee father, who has the gall to be vicar in an English village. People see him as either a curiosity to be mentally poked and prodded at, or a strange sort to be shunned and looked upon with suspicion. It’s not racism, really, more the common human wariness of something that doesn’t quite fit into the slot in which we want to put it. George insists on seeing himself as English; he insists on working as a solicitor, with a hobby that involves the very English Railway Law. All would have been well if only the Edaljis had stayed in their place. But they didn’t.

Barnes draws these two character portraits in a series of alternating min-bio chapters, cleverly painting pictures of their vastly contrasting lives, and cunningly drawing the reader into the same false judgments about them, before he reveals otherwise. Arthur is brought up by a strong and nurturing mother (his father was a useless chronic alcoholic), who regales him with tales of Arthurian legends. Little Arthur grows up believing in valour and chivalry and honour, and also in the power of storytelling. We see him initially as well-adjusted, strong, honourable - a man of the world. George is brought up in the cloistered environment of the vicarage, so overly coddled that, even as an adult, he sleeps in the same room as his father behind a locked bedroom door. Our first impression of him is as someone who is weak, naive and, yes, not quite right.

What brings Arthur and George together is a series of incidents that become known as The Great Wyrley Outrages. In the little Staffordshire village in which the Edaljis lived, somebody begins a campaign of harassment – a series of abusive letters and malicious anonymous pranks targeting the Edaljis themselves, as well as other residents. Then, six horses in the village are slashed. The two crimes are immediately linked to each other – despite there being no evidence whatsoever of a connection – and George Edalji is soon linked to the crimes – despite there being nothing but a bunch of circumstantial evidence against him. And, of course, the fact that he “didn’t belong”. It is beyond the police’s grasp that “one of us” could have done this, so it must have been the outsider. Ironically, the Edaljis were the only family in the village that trusted the police; they co-operated fully with the investigation, and believed till the moment George was hauled off to jail that the real culprit would be found. Even after his arrest, George had complete faith in the system of which he was a part, and was certain justice would be done. It wasn’t.

In prison, George discovers Sherlock Holmes, and on his release, decides to write to Holmes’ creator outlining his case, and asking for help. Despite receiving countless similar pleas, there is something about George that makes Arthur agree to hear him out. Probably because, in a way, he feels an affinity with George’s outsider-ness (Arthur’s lineage was Irish and Scottish). On their first meeting, he says to George: “We are both unofficial Englishmen”. It’s a judgement George finds strange; he has never felt anything other than entirely English, and he wonders how a man so completely embraced by England can consider himself not “officially” English. Arthur decides to take up the case – and even as he works to clear up the misjudgements the law has made about George, he is making his own. He sees him as mentally fragile, and feels George has somehow brought this upon himself by refusing to acknowledge his non-Englishness. George, meanwhile, sees only pure altruism as Arthur’s motivation, not the ego that is also a big part of it. At the end of the investigation – the result of which I will not reveal for the sake of those not familiar with the case – Arthur & George once more live separate lives, even though their names remain connected to this day. Arthur continues on the path of celebrity, George slips back into obscurity, in spite of his plight resulting in a major legal breakthrough in England – the setting up of the Court of Appeals.

This isn’t the first book written about the case – in 1905, Conan Doyle himself wrote The Story of Mr. George Edalji, while in 2006, a detailed non-fiction account was published as Conan Doyle and the Parson's Son: The George Edalji Case. However, in his Booker Prize nominee, Barnes takes this obscure unsolved case and turns it into more than just an absorbing mystery – even though it is that, and that would be enough for most readers. Under his pen, Arthur & George becomes an intoxicating cocktail of impeccably researched fact, and beautifully embellished fiction that raises the question: do we really know what we think we know? Much like its two protagonists, it refuses to be pegged into a genre – moving effortlessly from biography to mystery to drama to parable. While the book is remarkable in many ways, there is one talent of Mr. Barnes’ especially worth noting. Many writers can take you to whatever time and place they are writing about. But while they will mostly do it through elaborate descriptions of places and scenery, Barnes manages to do it solely through his art of dialogue-writing. He is renowned for it; and what he does with the words he puts in his characters’ mouths is akin to what set-designers and costumers do with props and sewing machines in the movies.

Arthur & George proves, once again, that Julian Barnes is one of the finest authors of our times.