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Usually ships in 1 business days | | | A real tour de force from masterful author Julian Barnes is Arthur & George, which was short-listed for the 2005 Man Booker Prize. Late-Victorian Britain is brought to vivid life in the true story of the intersection of two lives: one an internationally famous author, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, and the other, an obscure country lawyer, George Edalji, son of a Parsi Midlands vicar and a Scottish mother. They start out very differently. Arthur pursues a career in medicine before he discovers that he is really a writer; George, on his way to becoming a lawyer--near-sighted, timid and friendless--is victimized by locals because he is easy to scapegoat--a half-Indian in lily-white Great Wyrley. The victimization of George takes the form of nasty letters, the theft of a school key, and finally, the accusation that he has mutilated animals. Meanwhile, Arthur is becoming more and more famous for creating Sherlock Holmes, whom he tries to kill off once and is forced to resurrect because of his fans' outcry. He marries, fathers two children and then, when his wife is invalided by consumption, falls madly in love for the first time with Jean Leckie. The novel's style is smoothly revelatory. We slowly come to realize that George is half-Indian, that Arthur is the famous Doyle, that the woman he loves, chastely, is not his wife and, sadly, that George will not prevail over the forces ranged against him. When George, desperate to resume his law career after imprisonment, sends Arthur the sad chronicle of his history, Arthur sees immediately that he could not be guilty and sets out to clear his name. This case of George's lifts Arthur from the slough of despond into which he has sunk after his wife, Touie, dies. He is guilt-ridden, constantly wondering if he was attentive enough, if she could possibly have known about Jean. Realizing the immense injustice George has suffered, he is shaken out of lethargy and, in Holmesian fashion, sets out to solve the case. Julian Barnes is a gifted writer of enormous accomplishment. This novel is thoroughly engrossing, filled with Barnes's trademark themes of identity and love, longing and loss, and ultimately, an examination of man's inhumanity to man. --Valerie Ryan | | | |
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| | Product Details | | Average Customer Rating: |  based on 82 reviews |
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1 of 1 found the following review helpful:
 Flat-footed Fictionalization Jul 05, 2008
The strange case of George Edalji, and Sir Arthur Conan Doyle's quest to prove him innocent after years of public humiliation and imprisonment, is an interesting one -- I just don't think Julian Barnes is the right author to tell it. His approach is an intellectual and chilly one, when I think a little more emotion and heart would have done more to draw the reader -- at least this one -- in. And Barnes is inconsistent in his storytelling. After having Conan Doyle agonize at length over how his children will react to his potential remarriage, Barnes never tells us; the wedding and wedding party are presented in laborious detail (including a description of the bride's gown that seems to have been copied verbatim from accounts of the time), and yet not a word from the kids. Oh, well, I guess it wasn't important after all.
I'm a fan of mysteries, so I found the section in which Conan Doyle plays Sherlock Holmes quite rewarding. But the book is ultimately done in by Barne's pedantic, scholarly approach. He's obviously done his research, but does he have to include every piece of it? (An insignificant cricket match is described in an excruciatingly detailed play by play; what's the point, and why should we care?) And when Barnes tries for poignancy and profundity (particularly in the endless epilogue), the results are generally perfunctory and flat. Additionally, the headings that Barnes has given to the book's individual parts strive for meaning, but are just mystifying and pretentious.
All in all, I think a non-fiction approach (from a Sebastian Junger, perhaps) would have been a much more effective way of telling this fascinating story.
1 of 1 found the following review helpful:
just good enough to read to the end Jun 01, 2008
Well-written, but slow moving; knowing it's based on a true story adds to the interest, and I was grateful for the note at the end that tied up all the endings. The author is no doubt a good writer, but gotta wonder if this could have been quite a bit shorter, and still a good story.
0 of 1 found the following review helpful:
 Elegant Writing, Bold Structure, Deliberately Diffuse May 27, 2008
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 emotional 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 with content that fits, on reflection, into four buckets.
This description makes A&G 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 sad summing-up. For this reader, A&G, while always elegant and interesting, 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.
The Ending Changed My Whole Perception May 08, 2008
If you're reading these reviews, then you know the story is based on history. I didn't, until I reached the end and read the author's note. Just because Doyle was the author of the Sherlock Holmes books didn't necessarily make the story fact to me.
So I very much disliked the ending until I found out it was based on actual history, and that was, in fact, how the story ended. Then I was able to appreciate it much more.
Overall, the story is well told. They're quite the study of opposites. George is portrayed in detail, you get such a tremendously strong impression of his character it's as if you've met him several times. Doyle seems a little scattered. WHile George is cerebral, internal, and content to be with himself, Doyle is external, receives his satisfaction from interaction with those around him and needs that stimulus to keep himself going.
Does the story bog down in the middle, as the one reviewer said? I didn't think so. For me, it bogged down at the end, when it became numerous pages of narrative. But then, as I say, I learned that it was factually based, and my perception changed to one of appreciation.
3 of 3 found the following review helpful:
 Finally, A Man Booker Prize Finalist living up to its billing... Mar 08, 2008
The novel wades back and forth between alternating lives of Arthur and George. Arthur, a Scot, was a promising student and athlete with consider wit, charm and appeal. George, on the other hand, was born poor, the father of a Parsee Indian, has terrible eyesight, is unpopular, and has far less promise. Arthur's influence and power expands as he matures and he moves within the upper class. George, on the other hand, passes from one day to the next seemingly unnoticed - sleeping and praying in his father's bedroom and devoting his life to studying railway law - leading a life of a quiet common man. And then, the lives of the two men cross when George is accused of crimes that he could hardly comprehend, no less commit - but, because he is a "different sort" George goes to prison because of racism and corruption in the police force. Julian Barnes brings the characters alive in this fictional re-creation of a real life detective story - he keeps you engaged and absorbed in this page turner.
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