Arthur & George - Julian Barnes

I ended up quite enjoying Arthur & George in a cosy, comfy, sort of unchallenging way, despite it getting off to a very slow start.  The plot is uncomplicated, following the lives of Arthur Conan Doyle and George Edalji in separate but broadly parallel strands, until they intersect when George enlists Arthur's help in trying to clear his name following a miscarriage of justice. 

The two men are outwardly dissimilar: George is a cautious solicitor, son of an Indian father, now an Anglican vicar in Staffordshire, and Scottish mother.  He is a model of sobriety, propriety and stoicism.  He is also mildly dull, though I did feel very sorry for him when he was wrongly accused and convicted of a crime on flimsy circumstantial (and possibly even fabricated) evidence.  But even in prison he contrives to continue living a life in which nothing happens and which he bears patiently. Arthur, on the other hand, is a swashbuckling sportsman, doctor, author, chivalric dreamer and man of action and success.  Everything happens to him; partly because he makes it happen. 

Yet the two men have similarities of temperament: they want order and fair play, they value life played by known and consistent rules.  They are both upright citizens with a mental bent for analysis and sifting of evidence.

When Arthur takes on George's case I had hoped, and half anticipated, that the two men would change by coming into contact with a model of life so different from their own, but based on similar underlying principles.  This section of the novel did get a bit more gripping in the plot department as Arthur plays Sherlock Holmes with boyish enthusiasm and his long-suffering (male) secretary Woodie slips glumly into the role of Watson.  But the central characters were essentially unchanged by the experience, apart from being somewhat more cynical about the police and the Home Office.  They drift apart and George spends long, quietly satisfying years being a solicitor and Arthur goes on charging around the place trying to right more wrongs and also convert the world to spiritualism.

One of the recurrent themes of the novel is how to deal with the emotional and rational gaps between thinking something, knowing it, and believing it.  In this context, both Arthur and George look for tangible evidence to prove what they think.  Arthur goes a step further and becomes involved in spiritualism in an attempt to prove that what he believes about the fate of the soul after death is true.  I have to say I remained unconvinced about Arthur's passion for spiritualism.  And the seance after his death, was for me, excruciating.  Had I been Barnes's editor I would have pressed for that to be cut.

Which brings me round to consider what Barnes has done here in taking a true story as the carapace for his novel.  At the end of the book is a two page author's note detailing the subsequent fates of the protagonists (including Arthur's spirit).  It also states that virtually all the letters quoted (even the bizarre anonymous ones), newspaper and government reports, parliamentary proceedings and works attributed in the book to Arthur are in fact authentic.  That's an awful lot of material, and I wonder why Barnes chose to take so many unalterable facts and try and work in the spaces between them.  After all, surely that is the prerogative of the novelist: to take the workaday stuff of real life and turn it into something better, more exciting, exotic or meaningful.  Whilst I did enjoy this book, it didn't really excite me.  Though I do now have a bit of a yearning for the real thing.

Fellow blogger at the Magnificent Octopus seems to share my opinion too.

Comments

[Victoria]

I definitely concur with your overall feeling about the novel. It is very gentle, very meandering...it has that same sense of order and proportion so important to its characters.

Still, I can't agree on the ending. :-) I felt that after the comforting, liberal assumptions of the novel - that George is innocent, that racism is partly the cause of the injustice done to him, that honour and righteousness is all - the seance was a challenge. It was discomforting to be confronted with the dichotomy between belief and evidence... and rightly so I think; it made me consider how easily I had accepted the previous "truths" of the novel because of my own beliefs and how differently, and earnestly, the evidence could have been viewed through an alternative framework. Arthur's unfailing belief in Spiritism, to the exclusion of all reasonable arguments, was analogous (if morally different) with Anson's perceptions of the Edalji case. Both rejected the obvious evidence in favour of a strongly held belief or conviction.

[Sandra]

Hmm. Now I hadn't thought about the comparison with Anson - that's a good insight. Thanks Victoria. You still can't convince me on the seance though ;)

[James]

I'm still not sure why I bothered to finish the book except to try and understand why it was so acclaimed - I found it dull, unilluminating, and most of all pointless - I simply didn't understand what Barnes was trying to achieve by dredging up this ancient case which seemed fairly clear-cut and unmysterious. Ah well.

Barnes may have had reams of sources for Doyle, but apparently George's legacy pretty much consisted of the court records and his book on Railway law - Barnes created everything based on those documents. I think this leaves it unbalanced - of Arthur a biography, of George a novel, and not knowing how much of either undermines my assessment of the writer's skill.

[Sandra]

Yes I wondered too why a novelist of Barnes's talent should effectively take an off the peg story.

Your comments on the sources make perfect sense. There is slightly more life to Arthur (presumably because there was far more in the sources) but George is just a bundle of the attributes of a dutiful man. Like you I was a bit frustrated that if Barnes was going to take this 'real' story on, he didn't do more with it. I've just moved on to Banville's The Sea and I've no doubt that it is a better book, though I personally loved Never Let Me Go. That would have been a truly fine Booker winner. Why don't they just make me a judge. Sigh. ;)