Seeing

by

Nicki Leone

 

There is a kind of unofficial literary genre that in my bookstore we used to jokingly refer to as “what if?” fiction. That is, a novel that features the character from another author’s novel, or occasionally features another author as a central character himself. Jane Austen, the poor woman, has been especially subject to this doubtful literary tribute. For some reason romantics the world over seem unable to let Elizabeth Bennett and Mr. D’Arcy alone; they must write their own “what happens next” sequel to a story that ended perfectly well, thank you.  There have even been some rather distressing attempts to make Jane Austen herself a character, usually a sleuth in a mystery series. And while I can understand the attraction—surely a writer so clear-eyed and pragmatic as Austen, with such an unassailable talent for seeing into the truth of our silly little social fictions and pretensions, would make an excellent detective—nevertheless, I’m sure Jane Austen herself would be aghast at the mere suggestion that she poke around in a murder investigation. 

The literary character who has suffered most from the rampant imaginations of contemporary writers is the iconic Sherlock Holmes—who has been made to go on solving all sorts of crimes ad infinitum, not to mention undergoing various indignities in his personal life; they run the gamut from falling in love and getting married—an idea that makes a true Holmes purist shudder—to succumbing to madness and even (perish the thought) revealing his alter-ego as Jack the Ripper (horrible to think of but actually one of the better-written Holmes pastiches).

But oddly enough, although Sherlock Holmes is scarcely safe from imitators, his creator has been largely left alone by the literary community. Why Jane Austen would be a more likely candidate for their eager pens and word processors than Arthur Conan Doyle is somewhat mysterious. Except, of course, one feels that Austen might be too polite to complain, should the worst happen and these writers meet up with her shade in the afterlife, whereas Doyle was a robust man in life, and is probably so in death, and would be quite likely to beat the stuffing out of whatever was left of a person’s shade for their sheer effrontery and impertinence.

The temptation to cast Doyle into the role of his famous detective must be very strong, the more so since readers all secretly believe—fervent denials notwithstanding—there is always something autobiographic in the characters writers create, and Doyle himself was involved in several real-life investigations. But readers who open Julian Barnes’ remarkable novel Arthur & George (Knopf: $24.95, hardcover; Vintage: $14.96, paperback) with the expectation of reading a Holmesian-style detective story will soon find themselves adrift in deep waters.

Barnes based his novel on one of the cases that Arthur Conan Doyle did involve himself in—a miscarriage of justice surrounding a young solicitor named George Edalji, who was accused and convicted of mutilating cattle and imprisoned for three years before being released (without pardon) after it was clear that the mutilations had continued while he was incarcerated. Doyle’s intervention (and his own notoriety) eventually obtained an acknowledgement from the government that Edalji had been wrongfully convicted, and while it was not in itself a full pardon, the admission was enough to allow the solicitor to return to work his work as a lawyer, and the case eventually led to the establishment of a higher Court of Appeals for victims who felt they had been subject to wrongful prosecution. Prior to this reform, the only recourse for a person wrongfully convicted of a crime was to petition the Home Office for redress, which would be a little like being forced to write a letter to the White House if you had been convicted of a crime you didn’t commit.

A lesser writer might have been content with a recreation of what was a very complicated and occasionally gruesome, frightening case. It must be pretty tempting to be handed such a good plot, practically complete in all particulars. How simple it would be to simply stick a deerstalker hat onto Doyle’s head and let him do a bit of Sherlockian deduction.

But Barnes does not think in such simplistic terms. The case of George Edalji—the structure of the evidence and the arguments of the prosecution—is the framework upon which he hangs his extraordinary novel, but Barnes seems interested in asking rather more philosophical questions than “whodunit?” The reader knows this from the very first sentence: “A child wants to see.” A deceptively simple observation that invokes a visceral sense of our overwhelming impulsive urge to be curious, to look—even when we are warned not to. In alternating chapters Barnes takes us through the lives of George and Arthur from their first clear memories as children through the point where their lives intersect, and finally to the point where they are irrevocably divided by death.  

As the title implies, Barnes is as fascinated with the juxtaposition of these two men as he is with the fact that a crime brought them together. More fascinated. George is the son of an Indian vicar and a Scottish woman and considers himself an Englishman, although his right to that title will forever be called into question because of his race. Arthur is a cross between Irish and Scot who calls himself an unofficial Englishman, but he is a peer of the realm and an excellent cricket player; the English have no intention of letting him be “unofficial.” Arthur is an ophthalmologist and a scientist by profession. George is so myopic he can’t see more than a few feet in front of himself. By contrast, George is a solicitor—a lawyer whose job it is to determine what is real. He is interested in fact. “Lacks imagination” is the most common assessment of those who have met him. Scientific training aside, Arthur’s imagination is world-famous. It practically haunts him in the specter of Sherlock Holmes, a creation that he can’t seem to escape, and by the time he first meets Edalji, his imagination has found fertile ground in the subject of Spiritualism (which, to give credit where it is due, is a subject he approaches quite scientifically.) George is extremely private, Arthur extremely public. George has never married. Arthur has been married twice.  

There are such comparisons to be drawn in nearly every section of the novel; Barnes seems to delight in tossing them out for the reader like so many red herrings. What George thinks he sees and what Arthur chooses to imagine might have happened in the case of the mutilated cattle tell us less about “what really happened” and more about how each man handles what George calls “the journey from confusion to clarity” and what Arthur calls “finding the end of the story.” And Barnes recognizes that clarity, that knowing “what really happened” may in the end be supremely irrelevant to what the Home Office finds expedient.

Despite the fact that the novel persists in making the reader ask himself all sorts of introspective and soul-searching type questions, Arthur & George is a stylistically beautiful piece of writing. Barnes’s writing is often called “precise” and “jewel-like” and even “intricate” but while that is all true, it misses how smoothly Barnes can tell a story. This book, for example, is written almost entirely in the present tense—something I am sure most readers would have overlooked had I not mentioned it. It brings a sense of frightening immediacy and literally thickens the air of suspense in the story—for example at the frightening point when Edalji is confronted by a drunk and violent constable on a dark lane, far from help. Or when Doyle is sitting in the parlor of a bigoted Chief Constable, listening to his arrogant and self-satisfied prejudices with a rising sense of fury. Or, too, when Doyle asks his secretary, without quite asking, to steal a piece of evidence. It is no small thing to keep the pace of a story going over the entire span of a man’s life—especially when the main event, so to speak, when George and Arthur actually meet, can only account for less than a year of that time. Barnes does it without effort.  

He also takes a sincere joy in the beauty of the language of the era. He is not one of those historical novelists overly concerned with “bringing the period to life” by tossing in a lot of useless trivia and extraneous description. He lets his characters bring the era to life for us. In this case he revels in the language of a Victorian England at the peak of its might and influence; supremely arrogant about its position at the pinnacle of God’s creation. Victorian arrogance and Victorian hubris saturate the pages. George Edalji and Arthur Conan Doyle are both proud to be, as it were, the end product of all God’s work. And if they by and large no longer believe it is God who has placed them in this enviable position—to be citizens of the greatest country the planet has ever seen—well, they are nevertheless pleased with their lofty position in the general scheme of things.

This sense of manifest destiny is uncomfortably at odds with the resolution—or lack thereof—in George Edalji’s case. People who read mysteries for the resolution, the happy feeling of justice being done, are likely to feel frustrated. Certainly Sherlock Holmes would have been unhappy. Doyle and Edalji are not altogether pleased despite the fact that the case brought about a major reform of English law. We like to see villains get their just desserts, but the British Empire in this case has other priorities. But by the time the case is over, Barnes has created such a marvelous edifice that one can hardly blame him for remaining true to the historical facts of the event. This is not, after all, one of Sherlock Holmes’s cases. This is the re-imagination of George Edalji’s case. It was not written to exact revenge on the guilty, or to sanctify the innocent, nor to redress justice. It was written for the same reason any writer puts pen to paper; simply because the author, like the child in the first sentence of his novel, wanted to see what happened. Because even when we are grown up, we still want to see.


Nicki Leone showed her proclivities early when as a young child she asked her parents if she could exchange the jewelry a well-meaning relative had given her for Christmas for a dictionary instead. She earned her B.A. in Russian and Middle Eastern History from Boston College, supporting her college career with a part-time job in a bookstore. Since then, she has been in and out of academic institutions, but has always managed to work with books no matter what. She began working for Bristol Books, an independent bookstore in Wilmington, North Carolina, in 1993, and three years later became its manager, which is where she stayed for the next fifteen years. Currently she works for the Southern Independent Booksellers Alliance, developing marketing and outreach programs for independent bookstores. Nicki is a book reviewer for several magazines, an occasional on-air book reviewer and commentator for the Wilmington public radio station WHQR, and a co-host on the television program "Let's Read" on UNCW. She is one of the founders of The Cape Fear Crime Festival, an annual book festival for mystery readers and writers, and currently serves as President of the Board of Trustees of the North Carolina Writers Network. She manages all this by the grace of a very patient partner and the loving support of three dogs and two cats. She can be reached at This e-mail address is being protected from spam bots, you need JavaScript enabled to view it