Written by Julian Barnes as a work of fiction with a strong factual foundation, this was published in 2005. It incorporates plenty of dialogue, so it works well as an audiobook (my version was read by Homer Todiwala).

As the title suggests, it's about the lives of two men.

"Arthur", we eventually find out, is Arthur Ignatius Conan Doyle. And I confess all I knew about him was Sherlock Holmes... Which would probably have disappointed him (he found his character's popularity a bit overwhelming at times, hence his attempt to kill him off at the Reichenbach Falls, a move that was ultimately thwarted because of the popular demand for resuscitation).

But there's much more to Doyle. Born in Scotland, he trained as a doctor and an ophthalmologist; served for a while on a whaling ship; was a keen skier, cricketer, and golfer; acted as a volunteer physician in South Africa during the Boer War; and supported various political causes (though votes for women was not one of them...). Surprisingly perhaps, given all this, he also increasingly subscribed to and promulgated the tenets of spiritualism. And, of course, he wrote. Prolifically. Not just many, many Sherlock Holmes stories, but other mysteries, historical fiction, and science fiction.

Doyle -- at least according to Barnes's version -- seeks to live by the code of chivalry his early education impressed upon him, and when life rides roughshod over his concept of honour, he suffers. His wife, Touie, is ill with tuberculosis for many years. Hers is a death foreseen, but before it happens, Doyle falls in love with Jean Leckie, with whom he pursues a chaste relationship while Touie is still alive. When he is technically "freed", however, he suffers much anguish, and feels he has been dishonourable to both women. (He and Jean do eventually marry, once the mourning period for Touie is over.)

From this sense of chivalry also comes Doyle's great desire to right wrongs.


The Albert Memorial and Albert Hall form the backdrop to the closing scenes of the book

Which brings us to the second name in the title. He is George Edalji (1876-1953). And we need to know that the name is pronounced with the stress on the FIRST syllable, since those who are nice to George get it right, and those who are hostile get it wrong (deliberately, we suspect -- it's an interesting little example of micro-aggression). George's father is Rev Shapurji Edalji, an Indian Parsi by descent and a Christian by conversion, who is married to a British woman, serves as vicar in the rural Staffordshire parish of Great Wyrley, and has two other children apart from George (Horace and Maud).

George -- as Barnes presents him -- is an interesting personality. You wonder whether today he would be defined as "on the spectrum". He's clever, with the cleverness that comes of working hard, rather than of demonstrating flair and intuition. He's withdrawn, socially awkward, and submissive. And he is rational to the nth degree (we're told early on that "he lacks imagination"). Nothing wrong with that, you might think, and yet it leaves him vulnerable, because he is completely incapable of understanding the irrational, especially when it comes in the shape of senseless hatred and prejudice. All he wants to do with his life is practise law, because the British legal system, as he sees it, provides the foundation for civilized living, and is the bedrock of national life. He rejoices (albeit quietly) at the publication of his book (Railway Law for the 'Man in the Train': Chiefly Intended as a Guide for the Travelling Public on All Points Likely to Arise in Connection with the Railways).

While George is still at school, the Edaljis suffer a prolonged campaign of minor harassment. Hoaxes, poison-pen letters, unsolicited deliveries, obscene graffiti -- it must have been pretty terrifying, especially as the local police already seem to have a particular animus against George. Then the persecution stops for a while. But when George is installed in his own legal practice, it starts up again with a vengeance. There is a spate of animal mutilation incidents in the Great Wyrley area, and anonymous letters are sent to the police accusing George. The local chief constable is convinced, quite bizarrely, that George is responsible not only for the "rippings", but also for the letters -- and the previous letters.

There follows a riveting section, drawing extensively on primary sources, and recounting the 1903 arrest, trial, and imprisonment of George. Because, yes, despite the flimsiest of evidence, and against all logic, George, supposedly acting in collusion with a "gang" whose reality is never proven, is found guilty of mutilating a pit pony and writing malicious letters, and is sentenced to seven years' penal servitude. Botched policing, botched courtroom procedure -- it's a thoroughgoing travesty of justice.

And it's a clear example of racism. George doesn't see it. He somehow can't admit that everything he has suffered comes down to prejudice, preconceived ideas, and cognitive bias, the instinctive response of the narrow-minded towards anyone who is different. George can't or won't see it. And maybe that helps him survive prison, and pick up his life again afterwards. But everyone else with half a brain sees it... It's as plain as a pikestaff.



After the verdict, there's something of an uproar. George's father writes letters. Prominent people take up the cause. There's a petition.

And after three years, George is released. But there's no explanation, no pardon, no compensation, and George is still barred from taking up his legal practice again.

Enter Arthur Conan Doyle... It's 1906 when the paths of Arthur and George finally cross. And in the role of the knight righting wrongs, Doyle investigates, campaigns, writes, and generally makes lots of noise. A commission is appointed to re-examine the case. It determines that George has been wrongfully convicted, but stubbornly sticks with the jury's verdict that he wrote the letters. He is pardoned, but there's no compensation ("he has to some extent brought his troubles on himself"), and a stain is left on his character. The Law Society, however, in a decision that clearly indicates what they feel about it all, reinstates George.

Doyle carries on campaigning and investigating. He comes up with alternative suspects (although George, at least in Barnes's rendition, is highly suspicious of the actions and reasoning behind some of this, and fears that the new culprits are being burdened with the same kind of circumstantial evidence that he was). Nothing comes of it anyway. So Edalji is never exonerated of the crime of sending the letters, and never receives any compensation.

However, his case was influential in bringing about the establishment of the Court of Criminal Appeal. Whereas the previous system allowed only points of law to be reviewed in criminal cases, the Criminal Appeal Act of 1907 provided for the review of points of fact. Small comfort to him, of course.

There's a summary of the whole Edalji business here. And Roger Oldfield tells us that Maud Edalji, who outlived her brother by eight years, never ceased her efforts to have him declared innocent.

George, in Barnes's version, is invited to Arthur's wedding, where he is gratified to be singled out as a friend. And he also attends Arthur's rather peculiar, seance-like memorial service at the Albert Hall.



The bones of the story are intrinsically dramatic, and Barnes, of course, tells it well. He clearly draws on contemporary sources (verbatim sometimes). There are lots of suspenseful episodes, as the persecution campaign of George's family gets underway, and the case against George starts to build, and Arthur's investigation gathers pace. Some reviewers find the pace too leisurely, or the story over-full. I didn't. The individual threads consistently held my interest, and I liked the rich detail and period colour that came from contemporary sources.

Listening, rather than reading, I missed a point that Sam Wollaston picks up on, namely that the initial sections on Arthur are written in the past tense, whereas those on George are in the present: "It gives the sections a different vibe -- Arthur’s more established and establishment, George’s more urgent and immediate -- to reflect the characters’ different worlds and stations, and to underline the unlikeliness of their meeting. Present-tense George also gives the whole book a contemporary feel and resonance: this may be about something that happened more than a century ago, but prejudice is alive and well today; race, identity, (in)justice, morality and truth couldn’t be more relevant, in rural Staffordshire (I’m guessing) as well as everywhere else."

Indeed. This stuff has not gone away.

Actually, the thing about tenses -- though I can't double-check as I don't have the text -- is more subtle even than that, according to Magdalena Ball: Arthur's narrative changes to the present tense in the second section, when he falls in love with Jean.



You keep listening primarily because you want to know how the story ends. But you also get hooked on the characters.

Arthur can definitely be annoying. Heroic, for sure, but so very, very "certain" of things. He doesn't believe; he KNOWS. He's flamboyant, energetic, fearless, thunderous. He also comes across as a bit of a mansplainer at times...

But then he didn't have it emotionally easy.

His father, Charles Altamont Doyle, was problematic. A talented artist, but suffering from depression and alcoholism, he often left his family in precarious circumstances (one of Arthur's childhood chivalric wishes, according to Barnes, was to see his mother well provided for, and when someone else, an interloper, later undertakes that mission, the fond son is very put out). Charles ended up first in an establishment for dipsomaniacs, and later in an asylum. Plagued not only by alcoholism but by epilepsy and dementia, he died in 1893 at the age of 61. Arthur resented his father's lack of attention to his young family, but later came to value his work.

Arthur was close to his mother, Barnes tells us. Not subserviently, but a little unhealthily, perhaps, confiding to her everything about his relationship with Jean (seriously, who in his right mind lets his mother read his girlfriend's love letters...?).

And Jean... She was fourteen years younger than Arthur. Was it all platonic until Touie died? Some think not... Barnes portrays Jean very positively. Was he accurate in his generosity? Some think not.



In Barnes's telling of this story, it's also sobering how our memories can change -- and harden -- over the years. The account of the Edalji case that he gives in his autobiography saddens George. He finds it too cut and dried, too condescending, too apt to cast George's family as helpless (when in fact they were very proactive), and too close to the racist ideas that caused the problem in the first place (he talks about "half-caste children", and their slim chance of fitting into a Staffordshire village). That's the trouble, you see, with great men -- and old men (and probably their female counterparts). They become too confident... How did it feel at the time, you have to ask yourself; you can't rely on the version you reach for today, which has fossilized and grown moss.

Memory and knowing are themes that are dealt with very subtly and powerfully in The Sense of an Ending. Barnes is very good at making us think about what we can really KNOW -- as opposed to believe or think or surmise -- and goading us to consider how little that amount actually is. Ironically, of course, the intrinsic uncertainty of real life contrasts totally with the absolute certainty we expect from a detective novel. Our Holmeses and other heroes are expected to assemble clues, make them tell a story, and bring the whole thing together to give us -- yes, the sense of an ending. The Edalji case, on the other hand, is full of unknowns. No-one is brought to book at the end of the day, and Edalji's pardon is a half-hearted sort of thing. Many questions remain about the details that have come to light in the course of the story. Ultimately, we have to come to terms with the enormity of what we cannot KNOW.

And our Holmeses are expected to be logical and rational -- in the way that Edalji is, for example. And yet, as Laura Miller points out, "Arthur, creator of the most supremely logical character in literature, is by contrast a master of the kind of emotional manipulation needed to sway public opinion and win George a pardon". Early in life, Barnes has already told us, Arthur discovers the "essential connection between narrative and reward". The story's the thing...

Another important theme, as Ball points out, is sight. The book opens with young Arthur catching a glimpse of his dead grandma. This becomes his first memory: "An encounter in a curtained room. A small boy and a corpse. A grandchild who, by the acquisition of memory, had just stopped being a thing, and a grandmother who, by losing those attributes the child was developing, had returned to that state. The small boy stared; and over half a century later the adult man was still staring. Quite what a 'thing' amounted to -- or, to put it more exactly, quite what happened when the tremendous change took place, leaving only a 'thing' behind -- was to become of central importance to Arthur." Seeing in life (observing, diagnosing, travelling, keeping his eye on the ball...), and trying to see beyond death (clairvoyance means clear seeing, after all), will both become central themes in Arthur's career.

George, on the other hand, sees very poorly. This eye defect is what immediately makes Arthur believe implicitly in his innocence. Someone who sees this badly could not have done what George is accused of doing. And George, as we've noted, is also metaphorically shortsighted. Because he doesn't recognize the prejudice that underlay what befell him, he doesn't recognize its broader implications either. Yet George does have a clear view of the limitations of the process by which Arthur builds an alternative scenario: "It was all, George decided, the fault of Sherlock Holmes. Sir Arthur had been too influenced by his own creation."



So... Of course, I now have to read some more Doyle... And I definitely find Barnes intriguing. I listened to Flaubert's Parrot in 1993, on my long road journeys to work and back. My diary says things like "fascinating insight... cunningly crafted...; I am alternately amused, impressed, and irritated by it...; [my next book was] a great change from the sharpness and brilliance and clarity of Flaubert's Parrot".

But it was 10 years before I headed for another one. This was Metroland, and I obviously really liked it: "Well observed, with a neat turn of phrase, and very funny in parts... Really good. The process of aging (from 16 to 30) under a microscope. What happens to those ideals, those demands on life, those hopes, that determination to do things differently? Do we really choose bourgeois domesticity, or do we just settle for it because everything else is too hard? He's pretty happy at the end. You don't exactly pity him. If anything, you pity Toni. But you do have the feeling that something has been lost. What will he be at 40? Or at 50?... Amusing and thought-provoking, which is a good combination."

And another nine years go by before I tackle The Sense of an Ending.

Yet less than a year later, here's Arthur & George (one of Barnes's three Booker short-listings that didn't grab the top spot -- which The Sense of an Ending did).

Given the picking up of the pace, there's obviously something that fascinates me, which will be worth pursuing.