Fiction, World Literature, Peoples & Cultures - Fiction

Arthur & George

Name: Arthur & George
Author: Julian Barnes
ISBN: 9788433932211

by Julian Barnes

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Overview

En Great Wyrley, un pequeño pueblo de Inglaterra, alguien mata caballos y ganado, y escribe anónimos en los que anuncia el sacrificio de veinte doncellas. Hay que encontrar un culpable, y George, abogado, hijo del párroco del pueblo, es el principal sospechoso. ¿Quizá porque él y su familia son los negros del pueblo? El padre de George es parsi, una minoría hindú, convertido al anglicanismo. George es condenado, pero la campaña que proclama su inocencia llega a oídos de Arthur Conan Doyle, el creador de Sherlock Holmes, quien emprende su propia investigación sobre el caso. Arthur es, además, el reverso del opaco George Edalji, quien sólo quiere ser muy inglés y cree en las leyes. Arthur ya es un escritor famoso, deportista y tiene una mente abierta, incluso al espiritismo. Es un feliz moderno de su época. El caso de Edalji y la intervención de Arthur Conan Doyle, ambos verdaderos, han inspirado esta novela, sostenida por una exhaustiva investigación y por una imaginación vívida.

About the Author, Julian Barnes

Julian Barnes is the author of nine novels, two collections of stories, and two collections of essays. His honors include the Somerset Maugham Award, the Geoffrey Faber Memorial Prize, the Prix Femina, and the E. M. Forster Award from the American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters. He lives in London.

Biography

Julian Barnes once told London's Observer that he writes fiction "to tell beautiful, exact, and well-constructed lies which enclose hard and shimmering truths." Indeed, this is what Barnes does, sometimes spiking his lies with fact -- most notably in Flaubert's Parrot, the novel that became his breakthrough book. The story of a retired doctor obsessed with the French author, it combines a literary detective story with a character study of its detective, including facts about Flaubert along the way.

Before Flaubert's Parrot propelled him into the company of Ian McEwan and Martin Amis in British authordom, Barnes had been moderately successful with the novels Metroland (which later became the 1997 movie starring Emily Watson and Christian Bale) and Before She Met Me. He was also known to Brits as a newspaper TV critic. Parrot and Barnes's subsequent "Letters from London" in The New Yorker helped expand the author's Stateside following.

"A lot of novelists set up a kind of franchise, and turn out a familiar product," friend and fellow author Jay McInerney told the Guardian in 2000. "But what I like about Jules's work is that he's like an entrepreneur who starts up a new company every time out." Among other ambitious themes, Barnes has explored the collapse of communism (The Porcupine) the Disneyfication of culture (England, England), the simple dynamics of relationships (Talking It Over and its sequel, Love, Etc.), and the connections between art, religion, and death (The History of the World in 10 1/2 Chapters).

Barnes has also produced collections of essays, a translation of Alphonse Daudet's In the Land of Pain, and a family memoir (Nothing to Be Frightened Of) that also serves as a meditation on mortality.

Good To Know

In 2000, a cybersquatting professor acquired the Internet rights to julianbarnes.com and several other authors' domain names; Barnes later won his name back, and the domain is now an informational site run by a fan with Barnes's permission. Barnes had protested the professor's actions, accusing him of usurpation; but his opponent might have responded by quoting from Barnes's own (albeit satirical) England, England: "Indeed, wasn't there something old-fashioned about the whole concept of ownership, or rather its acquisition by formal contract, in which title is received in exchange for consideration given?.... It would have been unfair to call Sir Jack Pitman a barbarian, though some did; but there stirred within him a longing to revisit pre-classical, pre-bureaucratic methods of acquiring ownership. Methods such as theft, conquest and pillage, for example."

Barnes wrote four mystery novels under the pseudonym Dan Kavanagh, all of which are now out of print; the novels starred Duffy, a bisexual ex–police officer. Kavanagh's bio read in part: "Having devoted his adolescence to truancy, venery and petty theft, he left home at seventeen and signed on as a deckhand on a Liberian tanker." Kavanagh also happens to be the last name of Barnes's agent and wife, Pat.

Barnes was a deputy literary editor under Martin Amis at the New Statesman from 1980–82 and was also a lexicographer for the Oxford English Dictionary. Amis and Barnes later had a falling-out that became fodder for the press when Amis wrote about it in his memoir, Experience; Barnes is mum on the subject, but the disagreement arose when Amis defected from Barnes's wife to another agent.

Barnes has a cameo in the film Bridget Jones's Diary as himself, but in a lesser role than he has in Helen Fielding's book. In the book, Bridget is flummoxed upon encountering Barnes and embarrasses herself; but the more recognizable Salman Rushdie was substituted for Barnes in the film version.

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Editorials

From Barnes & Noble

The centerpiece of Julian Barnes’s Booker Prize-nominated novel is a real-life travesty of justice involving a wrongly imprisoned half-Indian solicitor named George Edalji and his defender, the celebrated writer Arthur Conan Doyle. In a style far less elliptical than his usual fare, Barnes reconstructs this incident through the reimagined lives of these two "unofficial Englishmen,", whose stories unfold in alternating chapters throughout the book. Yet even this “straightforward” historical novel contains plenty of the Barnesian twists we have all come to appreciate from the author of such postmodern masterpieces as Flaubert's Parrot and A History of the World in 10 1/2 Chapters.

Terrence Rafferty

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 color play out in firelit rooms … 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

Michael Dirda

Barnes's writing is, as usual, masterly throughout Arthur & George, not only as the pages shift from one man's consciousness to the other's but also in the way their author keeps the reader on edge. Facts are interpreted, then reinterpreted; the bigoted speak convincingly; nothing turns out quite as expected; and even the book's coda delivers a final shock.
— The Washington Post

Publishers Weekly

Arthur is Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, physician, sportsman, gentleman par excellence and the inventor of Sherlock Holmes; George is George Edalji, also a real, if less well-known person, whose path crossed not quite fatefully with the famous author's. Edalji was the son of a Parsi father (who was a Shropshire vicar), and a Scots mother. In 1903, George, a solicitor, was accused of writing obscene, threatening letters to his own family and of mutilating cattle in his farm community. He was convicted of criminal behavior in a blatant miscarriage of justice based on racial prejudice. Eventually, Sir Arthur ("Irish by ancestry, Scottish by birth") heard about George's case and began to advocate on his behalf. In this combination psychological novel, detective story and literary thriller, Barnes elegantly dissects early 20th-century English society as he spins this true-life story with subtle and restrained irony. Every line delivered by the many characters-the two principals, their school chums (Barnes sketches their early lives), their families and many incidentals-rings with import. His dramatization of George's trial, in particular, grinds with telling minutiae, and his portrait of Arthur is remarkably rich, even when tackling Doyle's spiritualist side. Shortlisted for the Booker, this novel about love, guilt, identity and honor is a triumph of storytelling, taking the form Barnes perfected in Flaubert's Parrot (1985) and stretching it yet again. 100,000 first printing; 8-city author tour. (Jan.) Copyright 2005 Reed Business Information.

Library Journal

This powerful book begins almost painfully slowly but builds strength as it paints increasingly complex portraits of its two central characters. Based on a true story, it reconstructs the intersection of the lives of novelist Arthur Conan Doyle and George Edalji, an obscure young English solicitor, whose Parsi father is an Anglican vicar. In alternating chapters, mostly titled simply "George" or "Arthur," Barnes traces the lives of both men from their childhoods into the 20th century, when George is imprisoned after being convicted on false charges of mutilating farm animals. After George's release, with his career in ruins, Arthur takes up his cause, hoping to use his celebrity and writing skill to win George a full pardon and compensation. The connection changes both men's lives. As fascinating a character study as one can find in literature, this novel offers insight into the creator of Sherlock Holmes, as well as 19th-century English society and justice. Nigel Anthony's narration adds resonance to the strong emotions that flow through the narrative, making this audiobook a satisfying production in every respect. Highly recommended.
—R. Kent Rasmussen Copyright 2007 Reed Business Information

School Library Journal

Adult/High School-This novel tells the tale of two real men: Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, creator of Sherlock Holmes, and George Edalji, an English lawyer of Indian descent. Their lives crossed when Edalji asked Doyle for help following Edalji's unjust conviction for mutilating horses. The narrative moves toward that point, which is in many ways merely the framework that allows Barnes to develop the interior stories of two unusual figures in Victorian and Edwardian England. His Doyle is a latter-day knight-errant, with all the failings and foibles one might expect; Edalji is the model Englishman with an inherent faith in the legal system and race is something that he cannot imagine could matter. Barnes has created two fully realized characters, and readers cannot help but sympathize with them.-Ted Westervelt, Library of Congress, Washington, DC Copyright 2006 Reed Business Information.

Kirkus Reviews

British author Barnes's deeply satisfying tenth novel, based on a turn-of-the-century cause celebre. In 1906, Arthur Conan Doyle, the renowned creator of Sherlock Holmes, was roused to passionate indignation on behalf of a sedentary-and extremely near-sighted-lawyer named George Edalji, who was disbarred and imprisoned after being convicted of mutilating farm animals. Doyle's investigations-which lifted him out of the despondency occasioned by the death of his first wife-confirmed that the Edalji family had long been a target of police persecution. Doyle's widely read articles and petition to the Home Secretary offered new evidence of Edalji's innocence and suggested the identity of the actual criminal, resulting in the overturning of Edalji's conviction, his re-admission to the bar and the establishment of the Court of Criminal Appeal. As enthralling as Barnes's fictionalized account of these events is, with its satisfyingly morbid Victorian elements-the anonymous threats reprinted here verbatim, the dead birds strewn on the Edaljis' lawn, the vicar's odd practice of locking his son in his bedroom every night well into adulthood-detection is only one component of the novel. The author also respectfully narrates the parallel lives of two Victorian gentlemen: George Edalji, whose Apollonian downfall was to trust too much in the rationality of his fellow citizens; and Arthur Conan Doyle, who, when logic took him only so far, made the great Dionysian leap into spiritualism. Like his favorite writer, Flaubert, Barnes is a connoisseur of middle-class normalcy, which he chronicles with loving attention to the peculiarities of bourgeois life subsumed under its sheltering cloak of good order. Hispast novels have been praised for their brilliance but occasionally faulted for a dry style overburdened with detail. Here, with a mystery at the heart of the narrative, every detail is a potential, welcome clue. The precision of the style suits the decorum of the period and serves to underline the warm, impulsive generosity of Doyle's support, which saved an innocent man from ruin. A triumph. First printing of 100,000 copies