The Review of Contemporary Fiction

Arthur & George, by Julian Barnes
reviewed by Stephen Bernstein

Knopf, 2006. 390 pp. $24.95.

Julian Barnes has long enjoyed creating fictionalized versions of historical personages and events, as early work like Flaubert’s Parrot or the “Shipwreck” chapter of A History of the World in 10 1/2 Chapters attests. In Arthur & George he surpasses those efforts with what is likely his finest work thus far. The title’s names refer to Arthur Conan Doyle and George Edalji, men from different occupational and social worlds whose paths crossed in the early years of the twentieth century. In a sensational miscarriage of justice, Edalji, a solicitor working in Birmingham, was imprisoned in 1903 for a series of livestock mutilations. After his release from prison Doyle became his champion. This is historically verifiable, but what Barnes so brilliantly adds to this account is the vital and intriguing portraits of its title characters. The text is divided into numerous short third-person sections, each named after its central consciousness. In alternating accounts we come to know Doyle and Edalji from childhood and only leave them years after the period of their acquaintance. Despite its ostensible “true crime” focus, Arthur & George becomes very much a meditation on narrative. Larger sections of the novel (“Beginning with an Ending,” “Ending with a Beginning”) allude to Doyle’s composition of the Sherlock Holmes stories, and as the narrative continues we are treated to the abilities of a master of characterization, voice, perspective, pacing, and style. Barnes evokes an entire world, and it is this sense of cultural possibilities and constraints, the freedoms they might make possible and the havoc they can wreak, that makes reading Arthur & George such a rewarding experience. Though it did not win, Barnes’s book was shortlisted for the 2005 Booker Prize for good reason. This novel is among the very best to arrive from England in recent years.