The game's afoot

Julian Barnes' latest novel, based on real events in the life of Arthur Conan Doyle, is a mystery story that raises questions about mortality, identity and humanity. Terrence Rafferty is intrigued.

Like a proper English country house, Julian Barnes's Arthur and George is large and solidly built and has ghosts. The most persistent spirit haunting the book takes the form of a question that at first appears innocuous, purely rhetorical: "How can you make sense of the beginning unless you know the ending?" Given that the speaker is a writer of detective stories – the eponymous Arthur is, as it happens, Conan Doyle – this seems a perfectly sensible utterance: a decisive rebuke to anyone who might imagine that a mystery story could be constructed otherwise. But in the course of this extraordinary novel about a real-life mystery, that question "passes over" (as Doyle the spiritualist might say) from its initial form, ends its brief life as a plain-as-the-nose-on-your-face certainty and becomes something altogether more elusive – a question that leads only to other questions and hints at mysteries not even the great Sherlock Holmes could solve.

If this makes Arthur and George sound like metaphysical-puzzle fiction of the Borges/Eco variety, I suppose that can't be helped. Its ghosts – the huge, imponderable questions of life and death and truth and time – are there, and nothing can reason them away. But being English means not making heavy weather of that sort of thing: you put up that big, rambling house and live with the annoying spectres as you do with the inevitable drafts. You get on with it.

What's remarkable about Arthur Conan Doyle, who liked to describe himself as "an unofficial Englishman", is that he possessed, improbably, both a classically British get-on-with-it temperament (he was a keen sportsman as well as an industrious and supremely disciplined professional writer) and a rather less typical curiosity about matters of the spirit. His late-life interest in, and indefatigable promotion of, what he called "spiritism" – the belief that the living can contact the dead – dismayed and bewildered many admirers of his stories about the hyperrational Holmes, but in Arthur and George, Doyle's apparent contradictions make a peculiar kind of sense, partly because the perspective of history can illuminate even the murkiest human behavior: knowing the ending is useful. And partly, perhaps, because Julian Barnes, whose unapologetic Francophilia may seem as unsound to his countrymen as Doyle's spiritualism, is something of an unofficial Englishman himself.

I wouldn't want to push this comparison too far. I'm talking about a novelist's intelligent sympathy for his subject, not about anything like wholehearted identification. Barnes is far too self-aware for that, and probably too modest besides. It's clear, though, that he admires both Doyle's refusal to be wholly English (the Doyles were in fact Irish Catholic, and Arthur was born in Edinburgh) and his inability to be wholly not. This novel's other title character, a solicitor named George Edalji, is, we're told, "taken aback" by Doyle's "unofficial Englishman" line because "he regards Sir Arthur as a very official Englishman indeed", and he can't quite understand why this famous, successful gentleman would wish to be anything else.

Edalji, born in the Midlands to an Indian father and a Scottish mother, is proudly, unimaginatively English himself: a painfully straightforward kind of man, for whom the law is a far more congenial way to make sense of the world than the religion preached by his father, the vicar of Great Wyrley, Staffordshire. With the law, George thinks, "there is a great deal of textual exegesis, of explaining how words can and do mean different things; and there are almost as many books of commentary on the law as there are on the Bible. But at the end there is not that further leap to be made. At the end, you have an agreement, a decision to be obeyed, an understanding of what something means. There is a journey from confusion to clarity". The idea that George Edalji – darkskinned, unathletic and unsociable, with a last name no one can pronounce – is, at his core, more conventionally English than Sir Arthur Conan Doyle would perhaps be sufficient irony for most novelists. For Barnes, however, a tasty little paradox like that is no more than an amuse-bouche. He has much bigger fish (and chips) to fry. By the time Arthur and George finally meet, well over halfway through the book whose title they share, we know enough about both men to understand that their different styles of Englishness in some way stand for their different visions of life. (Another tiny, succulent irony: Arthur, pre-Holmes, was an ophthalmologist; George is severely myopic.)

What they have in common, it turns out, is a fundamental seriousness about making the "journey from confusion to clarity", and when they meet, in 1907, they also share the (unspoken) sense that their individual journeys have been taking them in entirely the other direction.

The course of George's life has been diverted by, of all things, the British criminal justice system. He has, on mighty scanty evidence, been accused, tried and convicted of a series of livestock mutilations near Great Wyrley, has spent three years in prison and – maybe worst from his point of view – has lost his license to practice law. Arthur's confusion is moral and, appropriately, spiritual. His wife, Touie, has died after a long battle with consumption, leaving Doyle, now in his late 40's, with a very uncomfortable, even paralysing, load of guilt. He has been in love with another woman, Jean Leckie, for several years, and although he is now free to marry his "mystical wife" (with whom, in order not to feel an utter cad, he has not slept) he finds himself depressed, incapable of getting on with it in his usual vigorous manner. "He always imagined that Touie's long illness would somehow prepare him for her death", Barnes writes. "He always imagined that grief and guilt, if they followed, would be more clear-edged, more defined, more finite. Instead they seem like weather, like clouds constantly re-forming into new shapes, blown by nameless, unidentifiable winds." As much as Doyle hates this changeable climate, its unpredictability is not, in the event, completely bad for him: one day a stray gust blows him a chance at salvation, in the form of a letter from George Edalji.

For Arthur, the opportunity to leap into action, play detective and redress a grievous wrong is just the ticket. It offers a way to restore him to his best self and perhaps even to recover his long-held faith that "life was a chivalric quest", which in his recent funk has taken a bit of a beating. He doesn't quite cry out "The game's afoot!" but damn near. To George, whose preferred model for earthly existence is a railway journey – a dependable, uneventful, on-schedule progression from a starting point to a designated terminus – the matter is simpler. He wants his life put back on track.

The story of Arthur Conan Doyle and George Edalji is true, fairly well known and semi-important historically – Doyle's work on the case helped lead to the creation of a Court of Criminal Appeal in 1907 – and Barnes tells it briskly, carefully and vividly, with the sort of pace and variety that readers of popular fiction demand and connoisseurs of literary fiction learn to persuade themselves they can do without. "He is quite clear," this novelist writes of his novelist hero, "about the writer's responsibilities: they are firstly, to be intelligible, secondly, to be interesting, and thirdly, to be clever. While Barnes evidently agrees, and happily fulfills his obligation to deliver a cracking good yarn, he is maybe not quite so clear as Sir Arthur on this point – less certain that's all there is to the tricky business of writing fiction.

Arthur and George isn't interesting merely for its intelligible and clever story. As in every first-rate novel, its essence, its best self, is felt as a kind of spectral presence, less defined and less finite than the stories we tell ourselves, as we commonly and pragmatically do, for the purpose of aiding us to somehow, anyhow, get on with our lives – to imagine the clear light at the end of the tunnel, the ending that makes sense of the beginning (and, if we're lucky, of all the confusion in between).

The true subject of Arthur and George, the ghost in every corner of its stately narrative structure, is the yearning for clarity, a desire the characters enact in many forms – as religious faith, as storytelling, as legal scholarship, as hopeful "spiritism", as romantic love. The beauty of the book lies in the restrained, level-eyed respect Barnes maintains for even his characters' most desperate mental stratagems to keep confusion at bay. George's priggishness and legalistic narrowness should make him insufferable, and often do, but he's never only insufferable.

You can't help admiring his tenacity, his will to create and sustain, to the point of self-parody, a thoroughly English identity in a society that frequently appears determined to deny him that satisfaction. And Arthur, though a larger character, rangier intellectually, sometimes comes off as a blustering, blundering fool, John Bull in a china shop, smashing things to bits in his almighty rush to get to the end of one quest or another. But even at his clumsiest and most self-delusional, Doyle is, in this novel's generous and plausible view, a rather noble man who struggles bravely against what his contemporaries would have called the "baser instincts" – and also, more broadly, against the unacceptable idea that all the furious activity of living has no point, no meaning.

To clarify: Julian Barnes has written a deeply English novel, in the grand manner, about the sorts of existential questions the English on the whole prefer to leave to the French. Arthur and George conceals its contemplation of the imponderables slyly, discreetly hiding it behind the curtains while scenes of Dickensian force and colour play out in firelit rooms. Barnes narrates in a preternaturally calm, controlled third person, alternating skillfully between Arthur and George, and everything flows so smoothly that you barely notice he's doing something terribly cunning with tenses. George's passages are in the present tense until his arrest, when the progress of his life, as he sees it, comes to an unscheduled stop; Doyle's are in the past until he meets Jean and begins a relationship that, he tells himself, "has no past, and no future that can be thought about; it has only the present." Too clever by half? In a French novel, it might seem so. In Arthur and George, it feels more like an honest attempt to see through the story, or to see beyond it – in any event, to see more clearly.

And the business with tenses turns out to be crucial to the book's ending, a superb set piece in which George Edalji attends an Albert Hall memorial for Arthur Conan Doyle, who has, 23 years after their last meeting, "passed over". The ending echoes the novel's beginning, the firm, declarative "A child wants to see" (that child is Arthur) and makes sense of it, by inflecting it with doubt, suggesting that the proper end of a true mystery story can only be a deepened sense of the mystery of what we have seen or are seeing or will see. The problem with raising the dead, as mediums and writers of historical fiction know, is that they tend to answer questions ambiguously, obliquely, to give answers that don't sound like answers at all. And those are the answers you wind up living with.

Julian Barnes has never seemed the sort of writer who shoots for masterpieces. His novels, stories and essays have been reliably elegant, witty and humane – the 1984 novel Flaubert's Parrot, a clever and moving jeu d'esprit, remains his best-known work – and he has appeared content with that. (As well he ought to be.) Compared with the other formidable British novelists of his generation, Barnes is, well, less clear-edged, less defined. He lacks a signature trait like Martin Amis's laddish slapstick or Ian McEwan's deadpan perversity or Salman Rushdie's magic-realist flamboyance or Kazuo Ishiguro's coy poignance. Barnes is more changeable, more like the weather, and that, in the end, may be the best qualification to write a great English novel. Arthur and George is finally about how Englishmen protect themselves from the heaviest emotional weather, what hard, lifelong work it is just to keep out the chill and the fog.

©The New York Times