ARTHUR & GEORGE. Julian Barnes. 360pp. Cape. £17.99. - 0 224 07703 1.
A curious case for the creator of Sherlock Holmes, reopened by Julian Barnes
It was the most curious case ever to have baffled the Staffordshire Constabulary. In February 1903 in the small village of Great Wyrley, just north-west of Birmingham, a peculiar spate of attacks began, an orgy of mutilations, a bloody, motiveless spree. Animals were set upon in the night -cows, sheep, horses, ponies stabbed, sliced, ripped, speared and skewered with such grim and single-minded pertinacity that the officer in charge of the investigation feared for the perpetrator's sanity. Worse still, he suspected that the maniac in question might shift his attentions from four legs to two; that if he were allowed to run amok much longer, they would have a murderer on the loose. The culprit needed to be found, and soon, before events spiralled into tragedy.
Then -an arrest. The man in question was a young solicitor, the mixed-race son of the local Parsee vicar. He was a gawkily self-conscious prig who still lived at the Rectory with his parents and seemed to have not a single friend. His name was George Edalji and this was not the first time he had been the object of police scrutiny. A decade before, when his family had been the victims of a persecution campaign -abusive anonymous letters, hoax advertisements, malignant practical jokes -George had inexplicably found himself the chief suspect. When, in the time of the cattle mutilations, the letters started again, the police seized the chance to renew their suspicions.
The wheels of injustice ground surprisingly swiftly. In October, George was tried and convicted on circumstantial evidence -that he had been out for a walk on the nights of the crimes, that he owned a razor, that there was mud on his boots and hair on his jacket. The judge ordered him to serve seven years' hard labour, an extraordinarily harsh sentence given that even the defendant in the most outrageous case in living memory -Oscar Wilde -had served only two. And as George Edalji adjusted to prison life, the mutilations, the attacks, the letters continued unabated.
He was eventually released after three years in jail, without explanation or apology. Guilty and very possibly unhinged in the eyes of society and unable to practise as a solicitor, Edalji set about trying to clear his name, seeking compensation, a pardon, some recognition of the wrong that had been done to him.
When the legal system proved predictably, glacially indifferent he turned to the press and published an account of his ordeal in The Umpire. It was here that the case came to the attention of one of the most celebrated men of the age - novelist, spiritualist, father of the detective story, family man, sometime politician and enthusiastic amateur cricketer -Arthur Conan Doyle, who recognized a gross miscarriage of justice when he saw one and, with the determination and zeal of a natural-born crusader, set himself to clearing George Edalji's name.
None of which necessarily suggests fecund material for Julian Barnes. Yet Barnes has taken the facts in the Edalji case and woven a long novel around them: Arthur & George, a pin-sharp portrait of Edwardian England, a disquisition on the tensions between law and justice and a persuasively intimate view of two men who had more in common than they knew. As in Barnes's earlier Talking It Over (1991) and its sequel Love, etc (2000), the story unspools in a variety of voices and points of view, all jostling for narrative pre-eminence, bickering among themselves about the truth. It marks a return to one of the most resonant themes of Barnes's oeuvre, the malleability of the past, the untrustworthiness of history -what Doyle's most famous creation might have called The Case of the Slippery Piglet.
