Elegant Writing, Bold Structure, Deliberately Diffuse - Rated 
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 - Rated
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 ... - Rated
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.
Just fantastic - Rated 
One of the most satisfying and oddly moving books I have ever read. From horse-mutilation to spiritulaism via racism in Victorian Staffordshire! Fantastically solid characters, a pantomime villain and plenty of reasonable doubt in unexpetected places. This is a tremendous novel that could actually be characterised as crime writing.
A review by Philip Spires - Rated
George Edalji (that's Ay-dal-ji, by the way, since Parsee names are always stressed on the first syllable) is the son of a Staffordshire vicar of Indian origin and his Scottish wife. George is thus a half-caste, to use the language of his late-Victorian and Edwardian age. He's a diligent, if not too distinguished a scholar. He is uninterested in sport, is of small stature and doesn't see too well. He sleeps with his father behind a locked door, is in bed by 9:30, becomes a small town solicitor who develops an interest in train timetables and, by way of outlandish diversion, publishes a traveller's guide to railway law.
Arthur Conan Doyle (later Sir Arthur) is born in Edinburgh, completes medical school and generally accomplishes whatever task he sets himself, including becoming a world famous writer. Despite the fact that he kills off his creation, the detective Sherlock Holmes, ostensibly to devote time to tasks of greater gravity, popular demand insists that he raise the character from the dead. He does this and proceeds to generate even greater success than before. He marries happily twice and pursues and interest in spiritualism, amongst other good causes.
Perhaps because of who they are, the Edalji family become the butt of the campaign of poison pen letters. When they complain, all they accomplish is the focusing of further unwanted attentions on themselves. When a series of ripping attacks on animals remains unsolved, George, somehow, becomes the prime suspect. Convinced of his villainy, police, judicial system, expert witnesses, jury and press see him convicted of the crime and sent down for seven years. Good conduct sees him released after three.
Sir Arthur wishes to do good and takes up George Edalji's case. He researches the facts, analyses the possibilities, tracks down neighbours and officials who have been involved. He creates an alternative explanation of events and presents it to officialdom, seeking a pardon and compensation for George, who by this time has transferred to London to start a new life. The two men meet and the incongruity of their assumed expectations of life are as irreconcilable as they are irrelevant to their joint focus on George's case. After official review, however, the Home Office Committee eventually concludes in an ambiguous manner. Edalji was convicted of the crime and the conviction is declared unsound; but crucially he is not declared innocent. He is therefore found not guilty but then not innocent either and so not worthy of compensation. When, years later, Sir Arthur dies and his associates stage a spiritualist gathering in his honour in the Royal Albert Hall, George is invited and attends, complete with binoculars lest he miss a detail of the proceedings. The illusion of the event draws him in and at one stage he feels himself to be the centre of attention, only to find that it is a near miss. Most of the detail refers to himself and his father, but the reality then points to another who is immediately identified.
But, paradoxically, the quiet George Edalji and his Parsee (not Hindoo) father, Shapurji, were always the centre of attention simply by being who they were. Even Sir Arthur, the son's eventual champion, states this in one of his letters when he writes that it was perhaps inevitable that a dark-skinned clergyman taking a station in central England would attracts other's attention of a kind that would seek to undermine him, vilify him and attempt to oust him. The message is clear, that to be different from an assumed norm is to invite hatred, envy, discrimination and eventually ignominy. It is presented as a universal assumption, an unwritten element of universal common sense. Thus, as an intruder, the usual rules of justice will never pertain, a reality alluded to late in the book when George, scanning the Albert Memorial with his binoculars, discovers a statuesque embodiment of the concept of justice that is not wearing a blindfold.
What is eventually so disturbing about Arthur and George, however, is the realisation that both characters are outsiders. George is set apart from his Staffordshire peers by his skin colour and perceived race. Arthur, however, lives no humdrum life. He attends private schools, qualifies as a doctor and then becomes an international celebrity by virtue of his writing. He takes up minority causes and identifies with them but, despite his obvious separateness from mainstream society, in his case his position is never interpreted as a threat or a handicap, obviously because the separateness of privilege has a different currency from the separateness of even relative poverty.
Now an enduring memory of my own school history lessons was a textbook reproduction of a mid-Victorian cartoon of the universal pyramid of creation. It had God at the apex, immediately in touch via the saints with the Empress of India and then, layered beneath in widening courses were the gentry and aristocracy, the members of government and civil service, the professional classes and merchants. The working classes could perhaps temporarily ignore their poverty in the solace offered by knowing that they are a cut above members of all other races who, themselves, were just one up from the apes. It was not many more layers down to the low animals, most of which slithered or crawled. Arthur and George ostensibly tells us much about racism and racial discrimination in a society that was portrayed as the apex of a worldwide empire, a heavenly focus for aspiration. It also tells us about the power of presumption and has much to say very quietly and by suggestion about social class and its ability, especially in Britain, to legitimise difference as originality or eccentricity in some areas, differences which elsewhere would be threats.
Philip Spires
Author of "Mission"
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