An Unlikely Convergence
SCHWARTZ, LYNNE SHARON
An Unlikely Convergence Arthur and George By Julian Barnes Knopf. 400 pp. $24.95. Reviewed by Lynne Sharon Schwartz Author, "The Writing on the Wall, "Referred Pain" IT is unlikely that...
...Both stories are utterly absorbing—two for the price of one, as it were...
...One passage is especially wounding: "How the Vicar came to be a Parsee, or how a Parsee came to be the Vicar, I have no idea...
...his secretary plays the role of Dr...
...But at the time of his notoriety, superbly re-created in Julian Barnes' new novel, "his supporters...
...He would have remained in this "anomalous position" if not for a miraculous intervention...
...consolidated into legal fact, his character no longer of his own authorship but delineated by others...
...Both share a stubborn if shaky integrity...
...We learn little of George's Scottish mother, the only serious and regrettable gap in the story...
...George becomes a solicitor...
...That his son should be unaware of the racial prejudice permeating the local air like a miasma and causing his persecution, first at school and later by the police and the law courts, is more improbable still...
...In the novel, as in life, George is convicted on the most flimsy of circumstantial evidence (including hints of barbaric Eastern rituals), sentenced to seven years of penal servitude, released after three years thanks to petitions by his supporters, yet not officially exonerated...
...His mode of honor is to keep their relationship chaste...
...Now that he is finally free to remarry, grief and guilt are dragging him into depressed inertia...
...The settings of his stories range from the French Revolution to the future...
...All of these inform Arthur and George, perhaps more deeply and powerfully than in any of his earlier books...
...In Flaubert's Parrot, his third novel and the one that won him an international readership, a bereaved and betrayed husband obsessively studies the life and work of Flaubert, allowing the author to indulge in literary criticism and biography...
...The new book is aptly named...
...Reviewed by Lynne Sharon Schwartz Author, "The Writing on the Wall, "Referred Pain" IT is unlikely that the name George Edalji will ring any bells for most readers...
...How is he less than a full Englishman...
...George is raised on truth, righteousness, and Anglicanism, Arthur on tales of chivalry, knights rescuing maidens and other high-minded derring-do...
...As a result of the case, a much needed Court of Appeals is established...
...Then, a bit more than halfway through, the disparate lives converge in a remarkable scene of confrontation...
...George Edalji's purported crimes—writing threatening anonymous letters and cutting open horses' bellies in his village—were nothing like the allegations in the Dreyfus case...
...Mam" is the resilient family bulwark and Arthur's lifelong moral guide...
...Barnes has dealt with the vagaries of the legal system before, in The Porcupine (1992), based on a trumped-up show trial in a former Communist country closely resembling Bulgaria...
...The myopic George, blind to the antipathy his dark skin elicits, prides himself equally on his heritage...
...That an Indian convert should be married to a Scottish woman and presiding over a rural parish in Staffordshire during the latter half of the 19th century is only one of the improbable facts in this curious episode of Victorian history...
...Arthur, privileged by success, has the power to shape his own...
...Arthur clings to a vision of himself as a loyal husband...
...He can hardly return to India, a place he has never visited and has little desire to...
...As a solicitor, he has utter faith that the legal system will do right by him...
...He can even shape George's...
...one of his narrators (a woodworm) reports from Noah's ark...
...Arthur's father is an alcoholic with artistic aspirations who soon disappears into a mental institution...
...It begins with very brief alternating chapters on the early life of one and then the other of the protagonists...
...Arthur and George does not study Doyle's work but rather illustrates it— delightfully—through Arthur's investigations...
...The experiment will not, I hope, be repeated, for though the Vicar was an amiable and devoted man, the appearance of a colored clergyman with a half-caste son in a rude and unrefined parish was bound to cause some regrettable situation...
...Arthur becomes an eye doctor, but very soon achieves success through writing...
...He cannot go back two generations...
...His nearsightedness is what immediately convinces Arthur, playing Sherlock, that George could not have committed the crimes ascribed to him...
...Though he was a kindly, attentive husband, he is torn by self-reproach because he has been passionately, if chastely, in love with another woman for 10 years...
...Planning his campaign on George's behalf, he "felt back on familiar ground...
...the plot literally thickens...
...that it does not shatters his religious faith as well...
...Watson...
...Barnes has restitched it into a splendidly suave tapestry, dark in some places, glittering in others...
...A charmed life, in thrall to love, Holmes and the Society for Psychical Research...
...At the spiritualist tribute to the late Sir Arthur, a dazzling final scene at which the writer's ghost appears to the faithful, he is described as exemplifying "all the virtues we associate with the British character: courage, optimism, loyalty, sympathy, magnanimity, love of truth, and devotion to God...
...As they mature and their lives grow denser, the chapters grow longer, until it seems we are reading two parallel novels...
...Despite the obvious differences, their lives have common features...
...As Arthur puts it, "A man's virtues are turned into his faults...
...He is one by birth, by citizenship, by education, by religion, by profession__He has no other land...
...Julian Barnes is the author of nine novels as well as several collections of essays and short stories...
...Barnes has been criticized in the past for excessive cleverness, but here his cleverness serves him well...
...Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, that is, ophthalmologist, sportsman, devotee of spiritualism, revered public figure, and, above all, creator of Sherlock Holmes...
...George's life is circumscribed by work, family and his own repression...
...assured him that his case was as significant as that of Dreyfus, that it revealed as much about England as the Frenchman's did about France...
...All lives are stories, Barnes suggests, malleable or rigid depending on circumstance, character and accidents of birth...
...Self-control presents itself as secretiveness, intelligence as cunning...
...This has happened, now let us forget about it and carry on as before: Such was the English way...
...George is a shy, awkward child, raised according to a Victorian version of tough love: As a father, the Vicar is well-meaning but dauntingly austere...
...According to Barnes, speaking through the wrongfully accused young solicitor, the difference in the historical record has to do with national character: "England was a quieter place...
...Reticent, literal and scrupulous to a fault, lacking in social graces, he has no idea of how he appears to the world: a small, prim, darkskinned man with bulging myopic eyes...
...Both are Englishmen to the core...
...Something was wrong, something was broken, but now it has been repaired, so let us pretend that nothing much was wrong in the first place...
...What George or Arthur would make of Barnes' reshaping of their odd convergence we can never know...
...The book itself is a delicious brew, at once a richly detailed historical novel, detective story (Barnes writes detective novels, too, under the pseudonym Dan Kavanagh), courtroom drama, and chronicle of the lives of two unusual Englishmen...
...While George is being released from prison, Arthur is mourning the death of his wife...
...Arthur's flourishes and broadens, with a wife, family, a suitable house, along with the fame, fortune and civic duties attendant upon the creator of Sherlock Holmes...
...George clings to honesty, dignity and a lawyerly reserve, even though these qualities do not serve him well at his trial...
...Years later, living with his sister (occasionally taking her to Sherlock Holmes movies), he is dismayed to find distortions and omissions in the account of his case in Arthur's autobiography...
...Those are the raw ingredients of the story...
...His work is notable for its formal variety: He avails himself of every trick in the book, from the familiar resources of realism to the sleights of hand of postmodernism...
...Arthur regains his customary joie de vivre in the bargain and embarks on a gloriously happy second marriage...
...George has his story taken from him, "his life turned into headlines...
...Reading about George's case in the newspaper revives his energies: He will right the matter and clear George's name, using his own reputation and influence coupled with Holmes' powers of detection...
...But the miscarriage of justice and its repercussions were no less appalling...
...George Edalji was the son of a vicar born in Bombay as a Parsi and converted to the Anglican faith by missionaries...
...It is also a portrait of late Victorian England suffused by unquestioned racial prejudice, shaken by the decline of traditional faith, and—in the wake of the Boer War and later World War I—seduced by the blandishments of séances and spiritualism in general...
...in low moments he agonizes over his duplicity...
...It was like starting a book: You had the story but not all of it, most of the characters butnot all of them, some but not all of the causal links...
...Arthur's projects are almost always successful: George is indeed cleared (but the government's commission of inquiry is shamefully half-hearted about it, refusing to give compensation for his sufferings...
...what drew her to such an unconventional marriage is never explored...
...After 50 or so pages of Arthur, or of George, one tends to forget the other, until the abrupt switch...
...Both are stunned out of dailiness by a huge disruption—George by his arrest and conviction, Arthur by his unexpected, engrossing love affair...
...he does everything possible to keep his tubercular wife alive and comfortable, while sneaking off to see the future wife...
...For us the Victorian legacy is in tatters...
...Here is where Arthur comes in...
...he thinks...
...The archness that occasionally mars his writing is here kept to a forgivable minimum...
...But as diverse as they are in technique, Barnes' novels treat recurring themes: obsession, love triangles, and in particular the conflict between the illicit yearnings of the private self and the constricting expectations of society...
Vol. 88 • November 2005 • No. 6
