"How do we seize the past?", asks Geoffrey Braithwaite, the hero of Flaubert's Parrot (1984), reminiscing about an incident he witnessed as a young man, when a piglet smeared with grease was released into a crowded hallway. It squirmed and squealed and resolutely evaded capture as people tripped up, fell over and made themselves look absurd in their efforts to catch it. "The past", Braithwaite muses, "often seems to behave like that piglet."
History in Barnes's work is inherently untrustworthy, nothing more than a construct of the present. Think of the stowaway woodworm disputing the orthodox version of Noah's Ark in A History of the World in 10 1/2 Chapters (1989) or of England, England (1998), in which an elaborate simulacrum of the nation is built on the Isle of Wight, a greatest hits of British history, cynically but lucratively engineered to satisfy the demands of tourism. Time and again, Barnes warns us, we tailor the past to make ourselves feel better about the present.
Arthur & George opens with its protagonists considering the phenomenon of first memories. Arthur remembers himself as a child, climbing the stairs to a bedroom, opening the door, then staring, slack-jawed and goggle-eyed, at what lay within: the corpse of his grandmother, bony and cold, "a white, waxen thing", as he later described it. For the author of the Holmes stories it seems so right, so apposite in its morbid gothicism, the clear origin of that scarlet skein of mortality which was to run through the whole of his life. But is it also too convenient, Barnes asks. Is it suspiciously apt that Doyle's first memory should be something so macabre? Why a cadaver as opposed to something more prosaic, his mother hunched over a sink, say, or his father in the bath? Can memory be trusted? George, on the other hand -stolid, unimaginative Edalji -has no first memory at all, no primal glimpse of the sinister, no character-forming encounter with the Unheimlich. He wonders if he might just make one up.
The tricksiness of memory -this phenomenon of historical slippage -is evident again in Barnes's meticulous reconstruction of Edalji's trial. The case against him may have been largely circumstantial and shot through with inconsistencies, but it proves sufficiently convincing to persuade a jury of George's guilt.
When Doyle becomes embroiled in the affair, he starts to build a new case against a local man which seems to him to be absolutely watertight. The damning evidence comprises: a collection of bloody blades, a background in butchery, an implacable hatred of livestock -but, under examination, this turns out be no less rickety and gimcrack a construct than that which led to Edalji's incarceration. It is only after Arthur's death that something like the truth emerges. An elderly labourer, who had previously never been thought of as a suspect, confesses to orchestrating a thirty-year hate campaign against the vicarage, penning obscene letters and stage-managing elaborate practical jokes.
Even then, he makes no mention of the mutilations. The past scampers squealing towards the horizon, daring us to catch it.
Not that in the case of Arthur Conan Doyle there has ever been a shortage of hunters. In making the writer his protagonist, Barnes is again tackling one of Victorian literature's most familiar figures, who, unlike the cynosure of Flaubert's Parrot, never rejected the close link between art and the life of the artist. It is possible to feel we know Doyle intimately -from the numerous biographies, from his own forgivably sanitized and partisan Memories and Adventures, even from the big screen, where he has often been impersonated by a certain type of reliably crusty character actor. Writers from Kingsley Amis to Stephen Fry have tried to emulate his prose, and he has the curious distinction of appearing as himself in what are effectively pastiches of his own work.
David Pirie has written a series of capable detective stories in which a young Dr Doyle plays Watson to his eccentric university professor Joseph Bell; Mark Frost's The List of Seven has him as a Sherlock manque in a story which whisks together the great man's interests in criminology and spiritualism into a phantasmagoric conspiracy thriller.
Barnes's intentions are more serious, but there is something almost perverse in the way that the novel's opening sequences map out the first forty years of Doyle's life while skating teasingly over some of the ripest details of his biography -the lunatic father, his apprenticeship with Bell, his tour of duty aboard the whaling ship Hope, the creation of the Baker Street partnership. But these are events which have been strip-mined to exhaustion by generations of biographers, hagiographers, historians and pasticheurs. By consciously skewing established chronology and presenting as the focal point of Doyle's life something which in any other telling would appear as little more than an anecdote, Barnes succeeds where his fellow pig-chasers have failed, in making the most familiar material feel unfamiliar again, palpable, surprising and real.
Yet the story is girdled round with so many frames, caveats, diversions, parentheses and asides that it is never allowed to build up momentum. The criticism that has dogged Barnes's career -that he is more essayist than fiction writer -sometimes applies here, as his digressions, musings and philosophizing hobble any chance for the narrative to acquire conviction. With the literary novelist's disdain for genre, he tosses away the chance to work up the material into a meaty mystery, a detective story, a courtroom drama. There is surely no shame, nothing unworthy or philistine in making the reader turn the page not as a matter of mild curiosity but out of a fervent desire to know what happens next. Doyle, one suspects, might have had some suggestions.
