Arthur & George by Julian Barnes

August 4th, 2008

Arthur & George
Julian Barnes
505 p.

Vintage Books, 2006.
(First published by Random House, 2005.)

Back cover blurb:

Arthur and George grow up worlds apart in late nineteenth-century Britain: Arthur in shabby-genteel Edinburgh, George in the vicarage of a small Staffordshire village. Arthur becomes a doctor, then a writer; George a solicitor in Birmingham. Arthur is to become one of the most famous men of his age, while George remains in hard-working obscurity. But as the new century begins, they are brought together by a sequence of events that made sensational headlines at the time as The Great Wyrley Outrages.

With a mixture of intense research and vivid imagination, Julian Barnes brings to life not just this long-forgotten case, but the inner workings of these two very different men. This is a novel in which the events of a hundred years ago constantly set off contemporary echoes, a novel about low crime and high spirituality, guilt and innocence, identity, nationality and race. Most of all it is a profound and moving meditation on the fateful differences between what we believe, what we know and what we can prove.

I’ve owned this book for a couple of years or so, without reading it. I intended to read it last summer, but I didn’t, because it seemed so time-consuming and a little boring. Now, however, I picked it up, because how long can you own a book without reading it? And after a few pages, I was caught. This book I must say is the most beautiful I’ve read this year. The story, based on real-life events, was, albeit terrifying at places, described so beautifully. I don’t know what is true, or what is false, but I don’t really care - I will assume it’s all true. If it isn’t true, it ought to be.

I have never before read anything by Julian Barnes, so I don’t know what his other stories are like. In this story, however, the characters were described in so much depth that at places I felt as though I was them. Which sounds ridiculous, but there you are. I can’t phrase this properly, but this novel was so impressive; it’s not strange it was shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize. It is, I think, it didn’t win it. Of course, I can’t say I know who won it, or if they didn’t deserve it. This book, however, would have deserved it.

Often I am critical to novels based on real life happenings, but because this case was so unheard of (I had never heard of it; it’s to do with ripping of horses and Arthur Conan Doyle), I feel it was all right. (had it been, say, Jack the Ripper, I’d been less impressed.) I really felt for George Edalji, the unfairly accused, and I also felt that everything concerning Arthur Conan Doyle was believable. I know very little of him, what I know is mainly based on Murder Rooms, which is perhaps not 100% true, either. If I mix together all the literary facts I know about Conan Doyle, I’ll maybe get some truth in there, somewhere. Except, when it comes to stories, truth isn’t really in an issue? Whether what is said in Arthur & George is true or not, it’s still hell of a work of art.

Entry Filed under: English, Fiction, Historical