Once you start it, you won't be able to switch it off!
How does it compare to similar audio books?
Excellent
How does it compare to audio works by the same author?
Excellent
Advantages:
Excellent read
Disadvantages:
None
Recommend to potential buyers:
yes
Full review
When I read "Flaubert's Parrot" I vowed never to read a book by Julian Barnes. I hated the boring and seemingly random sequence of anecdotes about a writer who should have been interesting but, somehow, was reduced to commonplace and humdrum. Notwithstanding my disapproval Barnes, famously Martin Amis' snooker buddy and a prominent member of the generation of new British novelists who surfaced in the late seventies, has been successful at the cerebral end of the modern English novel.
However having made a sort of resolution to read all the 2005 Booker shortlist, and seen to my horror his name on it, I decided to put principle ahead of pride. I have to admit that as a lover of Sherlockiana it helped that the subject of the novel was none other than Sir Arthur Conan Doyle.
The narrative weaves two separate stories. At first these narratives go their own separate ways, with the effect you feel as a reader you are in the middle of two completely disparate stories. Naturally though their paths cross and the interaction between the two subjects and the worlds they inhabit is at the heart of
The two strands of the "story" run as follow. George E.T. Edalji is a British-born son of an Indian Anglican vicar who marries an English woman and settles in, Great Wyrley, a village near Birmingham. This is the late Victorian era though and ideas of political correctness and racial toleration are a distant, really inconceivable, notion. The local prejudice is to an extent tempered by the position of authority a vicar had in those times but it is clear many are far from happy at having a coloured priest, an interracial marriage.
George himself is a short-sighted, studious boy with a firm belief in the law as his father has in God and a dream of being a lawyer from an early age. Enduring bullying and taunts, which never seem to have a racial bent but are definitely motivated by his difference, George moves towards his goal before a series of horse-slashings is bizarrely attributed to him and he faces a battle to clear his name and continue to pursue his mundane ambitions.
Meanwhile Arthur grows up in genteel poverty in Edinburgh with the one aim of achieving wealth and/or fame to glorify his cultured, if rather domineering mother, and redeem her from the relative destitution which her muddling incompetent husband has led her to. Although he qualifies as a doctor it is, as we know, through writing that he achieves his goal.
However, unlike George, Arthur's life is also conditioned by the need to find romantic love. An early marriage to his mother's preferred candidate does not meet his needs entirely and he finds himself in middle-age confronted with the age-old masculine dilemma of reconciling love found outside marriage with his responsibilities as a husband and father. And in the midst of this turmoil he must also confront the fact his wife is seriously ill.
This may appear as an exhaustive resume of the plot: it is not. The whole point of their former lives, in dramatic terms, is to lead them to the confluence on their lives where, for different reasons, Arthur and George need each other.
The distraught Arthur takes up George as his cause and the biographical novel's point is to chronicle how this happens. In taking up George's case the novel, inevitably, becomes a whodunit worthy of Arthur's creation - or, more accurately, a whodidntdunit.
Even though this is faction or dramatized biography it is still valid to discuss themes. After all themes are present in lives and are not the exclusive preserve of characters in a novel.
The contrast between George and Arthur is at the heart of this novel (and I apologise for continuing to call it this for ease of reference). Apart from the fact they are intelligent, educated men, both very British in their own ways, there is little similarity between them.
Conan Doyle is a sportsman, good enough to play cricket for England and competitive football too; George is a nerd before the term nerd was invented. Short-sighted, goggle-eyed, practically autistic in his dealings with others. Crucially, Arthur is of old English stock and George is half-Indian.
Since the facts are accurate the book cannot avoid mentions of Sherlock Holmes and Conan Doyle's known obsession with spiritualism. Funnily though the famous fairy hoax where Conan Doyle was taken in is not mentioned… almost as if Barnes were being protective of his subject - except this is not a biography!
The characterization of George is interesting. Even at the height of his persecution Barnes refuses to bathos. He achieves this by making the character of George frankly not very sympathetic. This does not mean the reader is not driven to empathise with him, but this is because of the injustices visited upon him rather than the merits of his stiff, almost unfeeling, character.
The book has been researched meticulously and sheds light on one of English literature's most interesting characters. Is this biography or is this fiction? Well the book cover helpfully tells us it is fiction but the nature of the book is such that is resembles closest one of those celluloid biopics which surface from time to time.
Do I recommend it? Most certainly and without reservation. This is a fantastic read which works as a novel, as novelized biography or as whatever you want to make of it. Read it and enjoy.
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