The Arthur of Arthur and
George is Arthur Conan Doyle. The novel is based on a true
story. Doyle, guilt-stricken after the death of the wife he no longer
loved, took on the cause of exonerating a man who was falsely convicted
and imprisoned for mutilating farm animals. George Edalgi had been
freed by that time, but his reputation must be restored if he is to
resume his career as a barrister.
The meeting between Arthur and George comes well into the book, and
before then Barnes tells their back stories in alternating chapters.
George is a British citizen of Indian Parsee descent, the son of a
rural vicar. Solitary and described as “stolid,” he is the object of
suspicion when livestock in the parish are found with their bellies
slashed. The bigoted police chief targets George, seen as an outsider
even though he is a British citizen. Despite no real evidence against
him, George is convicted and imprisoned; he writes Doyle after his
release.
Arthur then is at a low point. He has been in a platonic love affair
for a decade. When his wife dies after years with consumption, Arthur
realizes that he has been emotionally unfaithful to her and feels
guilty. He also is discouraged that the public wants more of Sherlock
Holmes, whom he finds an albatross. Never before had he agreed to
assume a Holmes role in solving a case, but he abhors the miscarriage
of justice for George. The case restores his love of life.
In clearing George’s name, Arthur exposed the racism of British society
at the start of the 20th century. His work on the case led to the
creation of a Court of Criminal Appeal in 1907. All but one of the
documents quoted in Arthur and
George are actual.
The novel caters to many reading tastes: for readers of historical
fiction, it offers a historically accurate account of a travesty of
justice and its reversal; for readers of procedural detective stories,
a look at the step-by-step process Sherlock Holmes’s creator used to
exonerate an innocent man; for readers of biographies, an engrossing
portrait of Holmes’s creator by one of Britain’s foremost novelists.
The early chapters fill in details of Doyle’s years before he took up
George’s case, and the later chapters recount his happy second marriage
and his fascination with “spiritism,” the belief that the living can
communicate with the dead.
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