Fiction: Eileen Battersby says Arthur & George is Julian Barnes's finest novel, a very English book that celebrates traditional British fiction at its most honest.
Behind the famous detective, Sherlock Holmes, stands his famous creator, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, a man possessed of certain genius; most particularly, a flair for life and the business of living. Conan Doyle was many things: the cleverest lad in his class, a doctor, a cricketer, an alpine skier, a writer, a soldier, a loving son to a wronged mother and caring husband to an ailing wife, a responsible public man and a campaigner for justice. Julian Barnes, one of the cleverest of contemporary British writers, indeed at times too clever to convince fully as a natural storyteller, has taken historical and biographical fact and shaped an engagingly atmospheric, quasi-fictional period narrative sure to take even his admirers by surprise.
Alongside the man who would rue the day he invented Sherlock Holmes, Barnes places George Edalji, not quite a household name but a man known to anyone with an interest in Conan Doyle. Edalji was a Birmingham solicitor born to a vicar father whose Indian origins meant the family were subjected to an increasingly vicious series of poison-pen letters, attacks and accusations of crime. Forget the music hall title, Arthur & George is no knowing comic turn. It is a richly imaginative recreation of two real lives as experienced in a Britain moving from the Victorian into the Edwardian, with the Boer War in between and the 20th-century modernisation of British society beyond.
Barnes achieves the difficult feat of making both men utterly real while also stopping short of climbing into their minds. Initially, the narrative reads as a pair of alternating biographies, concise episodic chapters charting the contrasting progress of the two main characters. Conan Doyle is depicted as a confident boy who will soar. He has imagination (nurtured by his mother's cautionary tales) and a useful ration of anger, largely directed at his hopeless father, a painter of sorts and a drunkard who "lost his way in life" and who lets down Arthur's mother and her many children.
Arthur takes over the role of parent and guides his family, inspired by his love of "the Mam". The boy becomes a man and a force to be reckoned with. Not content to be merely the successful writer, he wants to do other things as well - and does. But before all that, Barnes begins Arthur's account with a short introduction of Joycean grace: "A child wants to see. It always begins like this, and it began like this then. A child wanted to see . . . A door was there to be pushed; he walked in, stopped, looked . . . What he saw there became his first memory."
Arthur's boyhood is spent in an Edinburgh household that, though shabby, is sufficiently genteel to provide him with a good start. His natural talents do the rest. By contrast is the closed universe of George. Here is a man who "does not have a first memory, and by the time anyone suggests that it might be normal to have one, it is too late". In one staggering opening sentence, Barnes, who has never written finer prose than he does in this unexpectedly beautiful, rather formal novel, evokes the character of George, one of life's victims. Once he arrives at school, quiet little anonymous George discovers exactly how cruel people can be, especially if your father is from elsewhere, your name is unpronounceable, you look that bit different and you can't see very well. As one of his class mates hisses at him: "You're not the right sort." In other words, he is different and is fated to pay for this social and racial difference.
Truth and the Bible inform his childhood. He has no imagination. "Inside the Vicarage, everything is quiet. There are prayers, books, needlework. You do not shout, you do not run, you do not soil yourself." Early in life, little George, fearful of the outside world, decides "he would prefer to stay here, inside, with Mother, with his brother Horace and new sister Maud, until it is time for him to go to Heaven". But there is no short-cut to Heaven for George. Instead, he grows up, studies law, becomes a solicitor working in a Birmingham, and continues to sleep in a room with his father, who locks the bedroom door.
At 27, George is still existing in a state of repressed boyhood, his only comfort is his mastery of the law governing English railways. His loneliness is a minor problem compared to the constant baiting he suffers from the local constable, who has decided George is a scheming criminal fit to be blamed for all ills. Far more than local resentments lie behind this abuse. Barnes is shrewdly exploring racism and the way it manifests itself locally and affects the individual outsider. Trapped by a personal isolation that acquires broader relevance with the years, George has no chance. His personality proves a triumph of characterisation for Barnes, as does that of Arthur Conan Doyle.
Both men emerge as real.
There is no sentimentality, no polemic, the text is dense with meaning and the dialogue is speech as spoken. The characters breathe. This novel lives off the page, wearing its research lightly. Above all, it is a real story, many stories contained within the respective experiences of the central characters. By the time Arthur and George actually meet, halfway through the book, it is because Arthur has become aware of the miscarriage of justice that has seen George convicted, with no evidence, of a crime he did not commit. Although his innocence was obvious, he was sentenced in 1903 for seven years, charged with mutilating a pit pony.
Ultimately, he spends three years in jail. No official apology is forthcoming, and Arthur sets out to secure one. When Arthur the Scotland-born doctor meets George the mixed-race solicitor, he observes: "You and I, George, you and I, we are unofficial Englishmen." It is a telling comment. Justice is a theme of the book, but so too is the notion of Englishness and its meaning. The two men are opposites: the eye doctor who helps the half-blind lawyer; the famous public man and the invisible private victim.
On another level, true to Conan Doyle's Holmes and to Barnes's previous incarnation as a thriller writer under the name of Dan Kavanagh, this is a detective novel engaged not only with one man's vindication but also with the search for the respective identities of both men.
Long regarded as one of Britain's most adroit writers and critics - Barnes is a very good journalist, as is evident from Letters From London 1990-1995 - he is a novelist whose slick intellectual confidence can alienate. Much of his career has been spent in the shadow of his highly original third novel, Flaubert's Parrot, shortlisted for the 1984 Booker Prize. Its two immediate successors, Staring at the Sun and A History of the World in 10 and a Half Chapters, had fine moments. But somehow Barnes never seemed to recapture the flair of Flaubert's Parrot.
Now he has. The cohesive, skilfully executed Arthur & George reveals a kindly, gentle side to Barnes. It also presents him as a storyteller alert to history, nuance and the subtle use of changing tenses. The insight and understanding he brings to his portraits of Arthur, as a man who heads off to the Boer War in need of "cleansing of the spirit", and of George, who, at 54, near the end of the book, realises "he is suspicious of joy. He has come across little of it in his life", achieve understated profundity.
Between its buff period boards, is Julian Barnes's finest novel, a very English book that celebrates traditional British fiction at its most vivid and most honest.
Eileen Battersby is Literary Correspondent of The Irish Times
Arthur & George. By Julian Barnes, Cape, 360pp. £17.99