Arthur & George is a gorgeously presented hardback, designed to look as though it had materialized fresh-minted from the 1900s;

the quality of its paper, its inky cover illustration, its heft, its rich, tingly smell all feel persuasively, distinctively Edwardian. It needs little imagination to think of it arriving at the homes of its two protagonists, brought to Sir Arthur carefully wrapped in brown paper, to George Edalji in a bundle with the rest of the day's arid and predictable paperwork. Easy, too, to imagine Doyle settling down at the desk in his study to read, George hunched by the fire in his office once his colleagues have left for the day, his copy held tentatively open at the title page. Doyle -master of the clockwork plot, arch- practitioner of the blood-and-thunder mystery -tugging at his walrus moustache and frowning a little at the opening chapters, reaching for his pencil to do a little judicious editing. We can imagine him putting decisive lines through those meandering sections which deal with his early life, being firm but fair with the essayistic asides, making a moue of affronted distaste at the novel's occasional excursions into his own sexuality. He would set about beefing up the malevolence of the law profession, make the courtroom scenes more thrilling, and then, his enthusiasm getting the better of him, add a chase scene, a murder, a girl in peril, a sinister Chinaman, a deadly poison, a fight to the death, a final, unequivocal rout of evil. But Julian Barnes has given us a quieter novel full of the unsatisfactory loose ends and petty injustices of real life, one that the placid, gentle George Edalji, turning the cream-coloured pages by the fireside, might have better appreciated and understood -and one by which he would have been thrilled and flattered and moved beyond words.