Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #9761 in Books
• Published on: 2006-09-07
• Released on: 2006-07-06
• Binding: Paperback
• 512 pages

The Good Book Guide
"intriguing"

Synopsis
Arthur and George grow up worlds and miles apart in late 19th-century Britain: Arthur in shabby-genteel Edinburgh, and George in the vicarage of a small Staffordshire village. Arthur becomes a doctor, and then a writer; George a solicitor in Birmingham. Arthur is to become one of the most famous men of his age, George remains in hardworking obscurity. But as the new century begins, they are brought together by a sequence of events, which made sensational headlines at the time as The Great Wyrley Outrages. With a mixture of detailed research and vivid imagination, Julian Barnes brings to life not just this long-forgotten case, but the inner lives of these two very different men. The reader sees them both with stunning clarity, and almost inhabits them as they face the vicissitudes of their lives, whether in the dock hearing a verdict of guilty, or trying to live an honourable life while desperately in love with another woman. This is a novel in which the 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; about what we think, what we believe, and what we know.

Julian Barnes has long been recognised as one of Britain's most remarkable writers. While those already familiar with his work will enjoy its elegance, its wit, its profound wisdom about the human condition, "Arthur & George" will surely find him an entirely new audience.

From the Publisher
A brilliant novel that will take Julian Barnes sales to a new level: his most accessible, most heartfelt novel ever.

Customer Reviews

Elegant Writing, Bold Structure, Deliberately Diffuse
Julian Barnes is an elegant writer with an interesting mind. From paragraph to paragraph, these qualities are fully apparent in ARTHUR & GEORGE, especially as Barnes examines the issues his characters face. Here is George Edalji at 54, roughly 25 years after he was wrongly incarcerated and a cause célèbre.

"...But most nowadays had never heard of him. At times he resented this, and felt ashamed of his resentment. He knew that in all his years of suffering, there had been nothing he longed for more than anonymity. The Chaplain at Lewes had asked him what he missed, and he had replied that he missed his life. Now, he had it back; he had work, enough money, people to nod to in the street. But he was occasionally nudged by the thought that he deserved more; that his ordeal should have led to more reward. From villain to martyr to nobody very much--was not this unfair...."

Barnes has divided A&G into four sections. These are BEGINNINGS, BEGINNING WITH AN ENDING, ENDING WITH A BEGINNING, AND ENDINGS. Within each, Barnes has tucked appropriate narrative material.

For example, BEGINNINGS, shows the young Arthur Conan Doyle and George Edalji establishing themselves in life. It also shows the start of an ugly and threatening letter writing campaign against the Edalji family and the first glimmer of hostility toward the Edaljis from the police.

Meanwhile, BEGINNING WITH AN ENDING, provides, among other things, a disturbing picture of the police, who begin an investigation of animal mutiliations with the ending--that is George Edalji is the perp--and then create evidence to fit their theory. What I'm saying, in other words, is that Barnes has created a narrative that fits, on reflection, into four buckets.

This description makes ARTHUR & GEORGE sound like a tightly organized book. But for this reader, the structure suggested by these section titles doesn't really capture the reading experience. Indeed, this novel actually seems to progress from a slightly stiff examination of young male lives in an imperfect Victorian world, to a long police procedural and courtroom drama, to a biographical tale of a manic gentleman as he fights injustice and his tendency to depression, to a slightly sad summing up. While always elegant and interesting, A&G reads like a hodgepodge with Barnes unwilling to settle on a single narrative perspective to tell his story.

Here, I say "unwilling" because this hodgepodge-like quality struck me as a deliberate narrative strategy. Proof for me exists in Barnes's frequent mention of the disappearance and then unsolved murder of Dr. Sophie Hickman, a crime concurrent with the mutilations. It's just a small story point. But through this loose end, Barnes seems to be saying that facts in life don't really fit into an easy narrative structure.

So, in the final analysis, I'd call this a bold novel, organized in concept but deliberately messy in the execution. In a way, A&G is the opposite of an Arthur Conan Doyle mystery, where every messy fact narrows the case and leads the ingenious Holmes to a neat and inevitable solution.

A Wonderful Dramatisation of a Tragic Story
What you don't discover from the back cover of Arthur and George is that the novel is in fact based on true events. It revolves around Arthur Conan-Doyle's investigation of the `Wyrley outrages' and the gross miscarriage of justice that resulted from it. Although embellished and dramatised, all the quotes and letters are original and the book is all the more potent for its foundation in historical fact.

Despite these roots it is written entirely in the style of a fictional novel. For the first half of its 360 pages the book alternates between the lives of its two principal characters, Arthur Conan Doyle and George Edalji, and regards the backgrounds and life-stories of the two men. About 200 pages in, the two characters finally meet and it is here that the real quest for justice and intensity of the story begins.

The quality of the writing makes reading a pleasure at all times, however some parts, such as Arthur's early life, are a little prolonged and ponderous, as is the ending. Indeed in terms of pace and intensity the book would benefit from being perhaps 70-odd pages shorter. This would be my one criticism and denies it the full five stars.

`Arthur and George' is a beautifully written book and provides a moving insight into the lives of two very complicated men, their emotions, trials & tribulations, and above all their courage in retaining their honour and dignity in the most trying circumstances. This is a book that must be read.

Separate lives entwine ...
A curious hybrid of a book - the fictionalised biography of two men whose lives briefly entwined. Sir Arthur Conan Doyle becomes interested in a miscarriage of justice when a solicitor is convicted for a series of hate letters and animal mutilations; he decides to apply the mind that created Sherlock Holmes to the case.
Told at first in alternating chapters, we compare and contrast the lives of Arthur, the young doctor and dashing sportsman who becomes a megastar writer, and George the meek son of a Scottish mother and a Parsi vicar father, who doesn't really fit in but manages to do well and become a solicitor. We see Arthur set up as an enthusiast who gets serially obsessed in his work and pasttimes, whereas George likes structure to his life and is happy with his daily commute into work.
Eventually things start to happen - George and his father are the targets of hatemail, and then the animal mutilations start happening, and George gets the crime pinned on him by the police who are increasing keen to make an arrest and is sent to jail. Arthur having killed off Holmes, applies himself to the case to get George reinstated after his release with mixed success - achieving a pardon, but no compensation - the government and police force can't admit to being proved wrong by an amateur after all. And apart from inviting George to Arthur's second wedding, that's that essentially.
An easy read once you got through the initial character building and a rather low-key finish, but a great middle.