The curious case of the slashed horse
Sebastian Smee
ARTHUR BL GEORGE by Julian Barnes Cape, £17.99, pp. 352, ISBN 0224077031 ✆ £15.99 (plus £2.25 p&p) 0870 800 4848 He’s damn good, Julian Barnes; no doubt about that. But what exactly is it that he’s best at? I have never been able to work it out. Arthur & George, his tenth novel, is a crime novel, a two-person biography, a romance, a historical novel, and a philosophical speculation all rolled into one and I enjoyed it very much. But at the end of it, as with so much of Barnes’s fiction, I felt a curious fizzing, and frustration at my inability to put my finger on the reason.
I say this is Barnes’s tenth novel, but in fact, immediately after publishing Metroland, his first, he had two detective novels published under a pseudonym, Dan Kavanagh. Two more came out in 1985 and 1987; all four shared the same hero, a bisexual, ex-police officer called Duffy. Under his own name, meanwhile, he has written not just his clever and engaging novels, but three brilliant collections of essays (including one on cooking), two collections of short stories and a translation of some profoundly moving memoirs by the 19th-century French writer, Alphonse Daudet.
Arthur & George is based on a famous episode in the life of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, the creator of Sherlock Holmes. A case of vile injustice had come to the famous author’s attention in the wake of the death of his first wife, Touie. George Edalji had been wrongly convicted of a series of malicious woundings of farm animals in the district of Great Wyrely. He was the son of an Anglican minister, originally a Parsee, who had married a Scottish woman and raised George and his siblings in the parish rectory.
All this is historical fact. What Barnes does with it is not profoundly transformative, but an impressive feat of empathy and organisation nonetheless. He sketches in the biographical details of both men’s early lives in alternating, page-long passages for the first fifth of the book. When we arrive at the pivotal events — the charges laid against George, his trial and subsequent imprisonment — the sketchiness turns to something denser and more novelistic, although we are still ushered along through the eyes of George, then Arthur, by turns.
Barnes’s prose is lucid but slightly antiquated; there are no self-conscious flourishes, just a subtly crystallised sense of earlier ways of looking at the world. George is shy, even stunted, in an admirably duty-bound, typically English way. He is a solicitor who, lacking wider experience of life, interprets events, even common, everyday occurrences, in an insistently legalistic fashion.
But part of Barnes’s wish in telling Arthur & George seems to have been to free George from his status as a footnote in Doyle’s biography, a mere object of his crusading benificence. Thus George also has moments of lightness and expansion. He is quite capable of impressing himself on the world.
To Arthur, George is a sterling fellow, but also something of a disappointment. He remains ploddingly sceptical in the face of Arthur’s helpful interventions, so that Arthur is reminded of something said about the man at the centre of the contemporaneous Dreyfus affair in France: ‘Someone had written that the victim was usually not up to the mystique of his own affair. That was a rather French thing to say, but not necessarily wide of the mark.’ Arthur, too, is marked out by humanising contradictions. Renowned as an empiricist (how else describe the creator of Sherlock Holmes?), he is also, of course, a fabulist. At an early age, when he used to tell stories to his classmates in return for pastries, ‘he discovered the essential connection between narrative and reward’. In adulthood, he is dutiful and morally firm, but also capricious; he yearns for both adventure and purpose.
We are constantly reminded of these tensions. Arthur is enlightened when it comes to racial prejudice, but he opposes women’s enfranchisement. He believed in looking without prejudice — ‘a practical necessity for a doctor, and a moral imperative for a human being’. But he tells George, ‘Perhaps you should try occasionally not to think like a lawyer. The fact that no evidence of a phenomenon can be adduced does not mean that it does not exist.’ Of course, the real Conan Doyle became increasingly interested in spiritualism and table-turning as he grew older. Barnes pursues this side of Arthur, but makes no mention of a damaging incident that over shadowed even his famous crusade on behalf of George Edalji: the Cottingley fairies. Doyle, who was taken in by this photographic hoax, wrote, ‘The recognition of [the fairies’] existence will jolt the material 20th-century mind out of its heavy ruts in the mud, and will make it admit that there is a glamour and mystery to life.’ Barnes’s retelling of the story of Doyle and Edalji prompts us to wonder not only about the tensions between reason and instinct, empirical fact and supernatural revelation, but also about the proximity of superstition to love. The whole book is thoroughly involving and full of particulars. But somehow I came to the end of it feeling that some kind of clinching artifice — something beyond wonderful writing and great sensitivity that might have transformed the tale and lifted it onto the plane of art — had been approached but not quite achieved.
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