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.
It is all in the themes, I guess, and few writers write about themes that get under my skin in quite the same way that Barnes does. All the same, I’d better not run ahead of myself.This book is based on a true story. I had wondered if it was true as I was reading it and although I knew that Sir Arthur Conan Doyle was more or less real (if somewhat larger than life) there was still the possibility that Barnes had just slotted him into a work of otherwise complete fiction to make some sort of point or other – probably to do with Sherlock Holmes. I knew nothing, of course, of George Edaliji, despite, it turns out, the important role his case proved in later legal history. Like in A Clockwork Orange, there are few fears greater than when incredibly stupid people have complete power over you. There is nothing more frightening than people who know something is the case, know it with all of their hearts. To be the victim of such irrational certainty is a terrifying idea – and one that occurs far too often in reality.It is hard not to love a story in which a great wrong is committed, particularly if there is then also hope of redemption. You know, Christianity would have remained just a curious little Jewish sect if it wasn’t for the aching need people have for redemption. The best of fiction, and this is the best of fiction, presents human redemption in a way that is much more convincing and, to me at least, much more moving than religion does. I suspect that I simply don’t have the imagination required to believe in humanity-wide redemption and can only cope with an individual level redemption.As I’m writing this review I’m trying to avoid needing to put a spoiler alert on it. Look, it is easy to find the story behind this novel: Wikipedia was where I turned when my curiosity got the better of me (fortunately, late enough in the novel for me to have worked out how this story was likely to pan out), but they are called spoilers for good reason. There were parts of this story which I was very glad I did not know what happened next beforehand. I was born with a rather bad astigmatism, so I have a natural affinity with anyone similarly afflicted. I also have spent the last eight years representing people who have found themselves in trouble and were unable to represent themselves. So, there were many parts of this book in which I saw myself reflected back at me (if in a slightly distorted mirror). The bits I’ve mentioned are the parts where this is easiest to mention, where it can be mentioned with some sense of self-satisfaction, at least in part. Where I saw myself and found it much harder to continue looking was around the relationship between Sir Arthur and Jane – particularly after his first wife died and his daughter told him that her mother said, on her deathbed no less, that he would be likely to marry again. I’ve played exactly these sorts of games too, and like everyone else who has played them, I’ve lost and won in much the same ways. Few writers capture the complexity of human relations – sexual as well as emotional - for me with quite the same shock of recognition that Barnes does.And then there’s death of course. Barnes has made a concerted effort over recent years to make this theme his own, as if he is laying claim to the kingdom of death in contemporary fiction. Or at least, the kingdom of thinking about the nature of death and why it haunts us so much. He reminds me of a modern day Montaigne. Montaigne said somewhere in his essays that his way of confronting the horrors of death was to think about it at least once a day – so that thereby he would make it familiar and so no longer something that needed to be feared. The scene at the end of this book where George confronts the ubiquity of death on a walk about a park on a pleasant Sunday evening is a lovely example of this most human and possibly inevitable of preoccupations.Holmes is also a constant shadow across this book. It is a strange thing – I nearly finished reading all of the Holmes stories recently, but one of the things that was completely clear was that Doyle didn’t enjoy writing them, particularly not the stories after Holmes came back from the dead. There is a snideness in the writing that needs to be ignored to really enjoy the stories. This is something Barnes makes clear in this book too. But he also plays with Holmes in other ways – this is, after all, a detective mystery and having Doyle in the staring role makes interesting comparisons inevitable.Perhaps my favourite part of the entire book is where Doyle spends a weekend with Captain Anson – and like Shakespeare, Barnes puts the most fascinating and thought provoking lines in the mouth of the least likeable character.The other thing this book does is make you think about how easy it is to put ideas into people’s heads and how hard it is to get those ideas out of your head again. Was George a sexual deviant? Was he too fond of his sister? How easy it is to pollute the mind of someone. And how easy it is for us to get carried away and to do too much for someone we want to help and thereby destroy whatever hope we had of truly helping them in the first place.And racism – of course, racism is a horribly obvious theme in this book, whether George admits it or not.You might find this book a bit slow, but it will get under your skin. Like the best fiction always does, it keeps coming into my mind and Barnes has handled these intricate and complex of themes in ways that can’t do anything other than fascinate.
What do You think about Arthur & George (2007)?
I enjoyed this book. It was given to me some time ago and had been sitting on the TBR shelf. Then fairly recently I read an article in The Guardian which discussed it because of a recent discovery that one of the forged letters was in fact a fabrication of the chief constable of the Staffordshire police, who was trying to discredit Sir Arthur Conan Doyle in his attempts to clear the name of the wrongly convicted George Edalji. You may be able to access it here: http://www.theguardian.com/books/2015...The case is a fascinating one and one would dismiss it as too fantastic to be true, except that it was.
—Eleanor
This is a terrific book and for my money, better than the one for which Barnes won the Booker. It begins as a two-person character study/fictionalized biography. One of them is Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, no introductions needed. The other is George Edalji, an Englishman of partly Indian origin (which I figured out only about 100 pages into the novel, a deliberate choice by Barnes I think), a guy Wikipedia has a lot to say about but who was unknown to me before I started reading this book. We follow the two men as they grow up, in plenty of detail. It feels like a Michael Apted experiment with just two subjects. Their backgrounds are different, so are their personalities, career choices, personal lives. Barnes takes his time to get to the central plot. The foundation he lays down in the early portions pays off enormously later as we come to know both these men so intimately that we view the later events from both perspectives as they unfold. When the two finally meet, we are aware of the significance of the event. Their thoughts, reactions and follies are all familiar to us.As the book turns in to a farcical courtroom drama and a procedural, it becomes unputdownable. I knew it involved a wrongful conviction and campaigning to overturn it but in Barnes' hands it never becomes stodgy historical fiction. The procedural aspects are thrilling. Themes like racism and spirituality are made relevant while still discussed in early 20th Century terms. George doesn't believe he is a victim of racial profiling so in scenes told from his PoV we don't see any overt racism. It's only when Sir Arthur starts investigating that we see blood-boiling levels of racial intolerance from those in power. There is also irony in the fact that a man who created a famously rationalist detective believed in seances and mediums and whatnot. For much of the book, Arthur's spirituality seems tangential to the narrative, but Barnes ties it up beautifully at the end to George's own spiritual journey. I love the way the book is constructed, even if it isn't exactly subtle. The other highlight of this book is how it subverts our expectations of the story. A famous author comes to the rescue of a wrongly convicted man. But this is no simple saviour-victim tale. For one, the victim refuses to indulge in self-pity. Also, the saviour has dodgy motives. The book pokes fun at Arthur's masculinity and hubris, explicitly stating that he only took up the case because he was too frustrated with his own tangled love life and desperately needed a release. Arthur needed redemption as much as George himself. Whereas George and his peculiar life have been dealt with resolute non-judgment. Cleverly, empathetically and entertainingly done.Ultimately, this book is a tribute to the man who created Sherlock Holmes and the campaigns he conducted to right a few wrongs. But the book never veers into idolatry, revealing and almost revelling in his eccentricities and flaws. WHAT A DUDE!
—Priyanka
This book drew me in immediately. Barnes tells the story of Arthur (Sir Arthur Conan Doyle) and George (George Edalji), two people whose lives intersect in a powerful way in the second half of the book. As with others of his books, Barnes packs a lot into a small package. In this case he brings to life the moral and ethical milieu/dilemmas of the Victorian era through Arthur and George's story. The story gradually unfolds, being told through alternating chapters focusing on one of the main characters. Before I knew it, I was completely immersed and couldn't put it down. Excellent and recommended!I listened to Arthur & George, outstandingly read by Nigel Anthony. I see a number of reviewers mention an unsatisfying ending, something about a seance. The audiobook had a very natural and satisfying conclusion to it and I now see it was abridged. I've ordered a print version from the library so I can see what I missed!
—Suzy
