Jan. 25, 2006
 
BOOK REVIEW: ‘Arthur & George’ Novelizes Actual Events of England More than a Century Ago with Startling Clarity, Compassion, Complexity
 
Reviewed By David M. Kinchen
Huntington News Network Book Critic
 
Hinton, WV (HNN) – Most readers know more about the quirks and habits of the fictional Sherlock Holmes than they do about his creator Sir Arthur Conan Doyle (1859-1930). Julian Barnes rectifies this in his parallel lives biography in the form of a novel “Arthur & George” (Knopf, 400 pages, $24.95).
 
This book was short-listed for the Commonwealth’s most prestigious literary prize – the 2005 Man Booker Award – and in my opinion should have won. The winner was John Banville’s “The Sea,” an outstanding novel by a distinguished writer whose works I’ve enjoyed.
 
Proper English gentlemen Sir Arthur Conan Doyle was actually an Irishman born to Roman Catholic parents in Edinburgh, Scotland. His father was a talented but alcoholic artist and his mother was a strong woman who kept the family together in spite of wretched poverty; she was feared and revered as “The Mam” to Arthur and his siblings.
 
Arthur fell away from the church, became a physician with few patients -- he joked that his waiting room was just that: a place where he “waited” for patients. Using characters from English mythology and Joseph Bell, one of his professors at the medical school in Edinburgh, Conan Doyle soon became one of the greatest literary masters of his era with his historical novels like “The White Company” – rarely read today – and the immortal Sherlock Holmes and his circle. Bell was one of the models for the violin-playing, cocaine-using private consulting detective.
 
“Arthur & George” is based on a real-life case of Conan Doyle taking up the 1903 seriously prejudiced conviction of George Edalji in 1906 after the death of his first wife, the former Louisa Hawkins – called “Touie” – from consumption. Edalji was the son of a Parsi father from Bombay and a Scottish mother. His father was converted to Christianity in India and was assigned a Church of England parsonage in rural Staffordshire, not far from the big city of Birmingham. It was a mistake on the part of the church: Many of the denizens of Edalji’s tiny town of Great Wyrley were prejudiced toward the mixed-race family, which led to the tragedy of young George’s life.
 
This novel by one of Britain’s best writers – I thoroughly enjoyed his “England, England” a half dozen or so years ago – is a tour de force, much like “England, England” – which envisioned the creation of a Disneyworld style theme park on the diamond-shaped Isle of Wight off the southern coast of England. This recreated England is the brainchild of Sir Jack Pitman (think Rupert Murdoch or Robert Maxwell or Richard Branson) who comes up with the idea of “the thing itself,” a re-creation of everything that adds up to England to tourists looking for the real thing. It’s hilarious, as I said in my review when “England, England” was published.
 
Barnes toggles back and forth between Arthur to George to Arthur and so on – a device that works very well in the hands of a master stylist. We learn about Sir Arthur’s platonic relationship – one that lasted 11 years before he married her – with Jean Leckie. Touie had told their daughter Mary that she wanted Sir Arthur to marry after her death – and he did. Spoiler alert: You’ll have to read to the very end of the book to find a startling fact.
 
George Edalji was a near-sighted, studious boy who grew up to become a lawyer in Birmingham. He should have moved there, like his brother Horace; he was an unlikely suspect for the crimes he was accused of and convicted for. He served three years of a seven-year sentence – a partial admission by the Home Office that this was a miscarriage of justice. Sir Arthur and his real-life Dr. Watson, his secretary Alfred Wood, go to the scene of the crimes and quickly learn that George Edalji was innocent – something Sir Arthur knew from the first time he met George in a London hotel. In many ways, the Edalji Affair was the English equivalent of the notorious Dreyfus Affair in France, which occurred about the same time across the Channel.
 
The investigation by Sir Arthur and his secretary led to partial justice for George, who outlived Sir Arthur by 21 years. One of the many stirring scenes in the novel occurs when George attends Sir Arthur’s spiritualist memorial service at London’s Royal Albert Hall. The Edalji case also led to the English creation of a court of appeals to reduce the chances of future miscarriages of justice.
 
This aspect of the many-layered novel reminded me of my Argosy-magazine reading days as a kid in Illinois in the 1950s. One of the features of this long-defunct magazine was Erle Stanley Gardner’s Court of Last Resort, where the California lawyer and creator of Perry Mason takes up the cases of people he believes to have been wrongly convicted. Argosy and True were men’s magazines, but they were not on the racy level as Playboy and even more salacious publications, many of which were printed by Rochelle Printing Co. in my Illinois hometown. In fact, the first issue of Playboy was printed there, in a town 80 miles west of Chicago, and the printing company owner was offered a big stake in Chicagoan Hugh Hefner’s publication in return for printing subsequent issues – an offer he turned down, to his later great dismay!
 
I can’t praise “Arthur & George” too highly. Julian Barnes takes us into the heads and hearts of his main characters and explores their complexity in a marvelous manner. We learn more about Sir Arthur Conan Doyle and George Edalji than we would in a conventional biography because Barnes isn’t bound by the rules of nonfiction as he writes. Knopf is to be congratulated for publishing this outstanding novel. It has everything a sophisticated reader could want in a book. The only problem is that it’s a page-turner that you’ll finish too quickly. Take heart: like all great books, it’s worth rereading.
 
Publisher’s web site: www.aaknopf.com