Arthur & George | Julian Barnes

Arthur & George | Julian Barnes | The Ending Changed My Whole Perception

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Arthur & George

	Arthur & George Julian Barnes Vintage, 2007 - 464 pages average customer review:based on 88 reviews view larger image
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highly recommended

Perfect

A perfect book. Subtly beautiful. Completely engaging. Julian Barnes throws just enough of his change-ups so that you are never exactly sure what direction he is going.

The Ending Changed My Whole Perception

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.

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Elegant Writing, Bold Structure, Deliberately Diffuse

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.

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Flat-footed Fictionalization

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.

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just good enough to read to the end

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.

reviews: 1, page 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11

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