Arthur & George (review)

Known for his fictive experiments, Julian Barnes has now written a novel that unfolds in Victorian England and uses both a Victorian idiom and an omniscient narrator like the ones found in Victorian fiction. Want more? He goes heavy on the Victorian standbys of plot, anecdote, and closure, too.

But all along, we discover, the slyboots has been deep-structuring the book in our postcolonial age. What does being English (or American) mean today? One of the book's eponyms, the lawyer son of an Anglican vicar, was born and raised in the exact physical center of England. His counterpart, "the most famous writer of his day," has both dined with the English king and won a knighthood.

Yet this robust hunter of seals in the Arctic, healer of combat casualties in South Africa, and creator of Sherlock Holmes was born in Scotland, the son of poor Irish Catholic parents. He speaks home when he calls himself and George "unofficial Englishmen." In a novel built around counter-images and inverted symbols, neither he nor George has English bloodlines.

In the case of dusky George Eidalji, son of an ex-Parsee from Bombay, the otherness hits you straightaway. It will also launch a legal action that ends with George's wrongful conviction and incarceration. The Victorian age mirrors our own. Violence in Arthur & George uncoils from the fair-skinned rural minority. Our Paris and Sydney is Barnes's Staffordshire.

Something like justice quiets the turmoil when his reserved bachelor half-caste teams up with the "large, forceful, gentle" extrovert, Arthur. Called "a journey from confusion to clarity," their joint quest for justice meets stiff resistance. The resistance had already been strong. Over a span of years, dead animals have been found on the vicarage lawn. Truckers have been delivering goods and livestock the family never ordered. Vile, tormenting letters show up in the vicar's mailbox. Finally, George spends three years in jail for mutilating farm animals despite the prosecution's lack of evidence to convict. Though a lawyer himself, George has been bilked of justice.

But in another irony, Arthur gains more from George's reclamation than the persecuted George does himself. His nerves frayed by promises he has made to three women (so much for the Victorian straight-and-narrow), he needs a distraction at the time he hears of George's distress. Answering the Victorian call to action (and assuming the white man's burden?) helps him, his championing of George both soothing and energizing this physician who couldn't heal himself.

His actionism could also touch the spirit world. Sir Arthur Conan Doyle's interest in telepathy and spiritualism moves forward in tandem with his campaign for George. His labors invoke the beyond in the book's riveting last scene, a ceremony at London's Albert Hall, where the newly dead Arthur (1859–1930) might have materialized to the crowd of eight thousand gathered to farewell him.

How un-English this ectoplasmic finale. But, let us add, how therapeutic to our embittered, divisive age. Fresh, new outlooks on ever-worsening political feuds could build peace, not only between people but perhaps also between the living and those believed dead. Barnes isn't groping for answers. He knows that most séances are hocus-pocus. He also reminds us, though, that the flawed and the corrupt are the only materials humanity has given God to work with.

But, no disguised manifesto, Arthur & George is an artistically wrought novel. Its boldest coup builds on the truth that, despite our denials, we're all soft as mush on the inside. The book's first half shows Arthur cringing several times from references to Sherlock Holmes, whom he had tried in vain to kill in "The Final Problem" (1893). Barnes is priming us for some Sherlockian razzle-dazzle. His timing is perfect. Just as we'd all relish the return of John le Carré's owl-eyed master spy, George Smiley, so do we snap to the disguises and the forensic brilliance that help Arthur, together with his Watson, clear George of guilt.

A well-planted reference...