Arthur & George unites an unlikely duo

Marcella Veneziale Arts Editor

Julian Barnes, one of England’s pre-eminent authors, released his latest work this June. Arthur & George explores the relationship between a young Sir Arthur Conan Doyle and George Edalji, a meek boy residing in Scotland. The time is the Victorian era, and George, who is part Indian and part Scottish, suffers bullying for this from his cruel peers. His story is juxtaposed with Arthur’s, who attends a boarding school and is popular among the boys for his witty storytelling.

The novel is a work of fiction, based on true events. In 1903, George Edalji was wrongly convicted of torturing and mutilating farm animals, and eventually served seven years in prison for the crime. In a rare turn of events, Doyle agreed to defend Edalji, although his expertise lay only in recounting detective stories, not solving them.

Arthur and George are about as different as two boys could be. The story commences with a retelling of Arthur’s first memory—spying his grandmother’s corpse lying on a bed in his Edinburgh home. The narrator assigns this moment as a turning point in the boy’s life, “The small boy stared; and over half a century later the adult man was still staring.”

Later descriptions of Arthur do not reveal a sense of trauma from this event. Arthur, in fact, seems just like other boys, despite his alc holic father, who is described as “his occasional father.” His mother, who presides over his discipline with a wooden porridge spoon and instills in him a love of storytelling, ships him off to boarding school. Now, he must only endure his chaotic home-life for six weeks out of the year.

The presentation of the novel rapidly shifts from anecdotes of Arthur’s life to George’s. Because of this, it is impossible not to compare the difficulties of their lives. George grows up the son of a vicar, and his father instills in him a great fear of lying: “Once you start telling lies…nothing will stop you until the hangman slips a noose around your neck.” His father, in George’s words, takes any free opportunity to “catechize” him, and as a result, he grows up a meek and tortured boy.

The coincidences and ironies between the two characters appear among many of the vignettes. There are the racial differences, that Arthur’s family is pure-bred Scottish and the tension between George’s Parsee Indian and Scottish heritages. The personality differences are most startling, as Arthur is eager to jump on a desk and tell a tale to his classmates for sweets, while George would slink into the background at such an opportunity. It almost seems fated that the parallel that the characters’ lives run finally come to a head with George in a tough situation, and the brasher Arthur eventually coming to his aid.

Barnes’ style in this most recent novel is a drastic change from his earlier works, especially 1984’s Flaubert’s Parrot or his novels written under the pseudonym Dan Kavanagh. To fully plant the reader in the Victorian era, his language is much more formal and upright, and he attempts to explain everything to the fullest, particularly in a passage describing George’s school uniform: “He wears a deep starched collar with a loose bow to hide the stud, a waistcoat which buttons up to just below the tie, and a jacket with high, almost horizontal lapels.”
Not all details of the case are neatly resolved at the end, which removes the novel from the traditional detective (or Sherlock Holmes) genre. The book is more a social commentary on England during this time, and provides in great detail little-known but salient facts of the era. Barnes’ work has been well-received in England, and is now attaining greater popularity in the states, showing that this famed writer can still produce an intelligent and interesting detective story.