There I was plugging along through the first 30 pages of Julian Barnes's acclaimed new novel Arthur & George (Knopf $24.95), doing my best to maintain interest in prose that seemed almost wilfully flat when I ran into this sentence: "The human dead also bore in their gizzard pebbles from a land the maps ignored."
Say that again?
Certain sentences can stop you in your tracks. It's as if the writer grabs you and tells you to pay attention. For me, it worked. On one level the sentence describing Arthur Conan Doyle's reaction to the face of a corpse lets you know that his involvement in spiritualism will not be left out of the story. On the level that mattered more to me, however, the sentence suggested that the author of the literary adventure, Flaubert's Parrot, might have enough surprises up his sleeve to make the prospect of the remaining 350-plus pages less daunting. Even so, the eventual reading experience didn't live up to the blurbs on the back of the dust jacket. I didn't find the book "compelling," "engrossing," or "gripping," nor did I find the dialogue "riveting" (certainly not the conversations between Sir Arthur and his mother), nor did I "turn the pages with mounting and almost intolerable tension." The reviewers quoted made Arthur & George sound like the sort of thriller that might be destined to land on the New York Times best-seller list. In fact, it did turn up on the list, but not for long; it surfaced near the bottom and after two weeks, it was gone, probably for good. The same blurbs praising it as a page-turner also contain clues as to why it didn't rise higher or stay on longer. Books that are "beautifully controlled," "elegantly intelligent," and written with "elegance and restraint" are unlikely to make much of a dent in the list.
Reading and reviewing Colm Tóibín's The Master about a year ago, I found that much of the tension informing the novel derived from the author's resistance to the elaborate manner of his real-life protagonist, Henry James. One thing Barnes seems to be holding at bay in Arthur & George is the playful, free-form spirit that made Flaubert's Parrot his breakthrough book. "Gripping" it was not. Though it was billed as a novel, more than one reviewer termed it an anti-novel. While Barnes has written a number of relatively "straight" works of fiction, as well as four detective novels under the name Dan Kavanagh, he's moved to another level with Arthur & George, clearly his most deliberate and challenging exploration of the novel form. At the same time, the subject matter — a documented incident in which Sir Arthur Conan Doyle used his power and prestige and Sherlock-Holmesian ingenuity to exonerate a falsely accused and imprisoned half-Indian lawyer named George Edalji — offers ingredients that would seem to encourage just the sort of piggybacking Barnes practiced so effectively in his best-known work. Nothing if not an ironist, he targeted the very book he was writing when halfway through Flaubert's Parrot he enumerated novels and genres that should be banned: "There shall be no more novels which are really about other novels. No modern versions,' reworkings, sequels or prequels. No imaginative completions of works left unfinished on their author's death. Instead, every writer is to be issued with a sampler in coloured wools to be hung over the fireplace. It reads: Knit Your Own Stuff."
Piggybackers are legion these days. The line between fiction and biography has been crossed time and again by novelists who choose to borrow protagonists from real life, including respected authors such as Barnes, Tóibín, and E.L. Doctorow (most recently in The March). Less respected are the literary opportunists who presume to write sequels to Huckleberry Finn, The Mystery of Edwin Drood, Wuthering Heights, Gone With the Wind, and Lolita; not to mention the piggybacker posing as a parodist who "sexed up" Jane Austen in Pride and Promiscuity: The Lost Sex Scenes of Jane Austen. Of course no literary figure has been piggybacked as often as Sherlock Holmes. It should also be noted that the most momentous work in English in the 20th Century came about when James Joyce piggybacked on Homer.
On the other hand, one of the qualities that sets Arthur & George admirably apart is that its novelistic force comes not so much from the ample material offered by the life and work of the author who gave us Sherlock Holmes as it does from the relatively limited and obscure sources pertaining to George Edalji, the proud author of a pamphlet on railway law.
Barnes's portrait of Arthur Conan Doyle is certainly as good as, and probably superior to, anything an enlightened biographer could manage. The advantage of fiction is that it permits the novelist to venture deeper into the sort of intimate terrritory forbidden to the biographer (in this case, for example, a passage describing the consequences of Doyle's repressed sexual excitement); then again, the parts of the book that dragged on too long were those devoted to Doyle's soul-searching about an extra-marital affair and his determination to do right by his terminally ill wife. What Barnes accomplishes with Arthur as a character offers no real surprises. What he does with George is more subtle and more inventive, and by the time you come to the truly brilliant concluding section of the book, you begin to realize that he has created a substantial character out of scant material. The son of a Scots woman and an Indian who converted to the Church of England and became the vicar of a small church in Staffordshire, George is so alive to us that when Barnes tells us what he's thinking, we already seem to know it. The development of George's character gives a new meaning to that tired old textbook phrase, "character development," and it's one of the things that makes Arthur & George worth reading.
Writers, major and minor, have struggled with the problem of the ending, or, as it's been termed, the "curse of the denouement." For Barnes, the denouement was not a curse but a blessing. You almost have to believe he wrote the book for the sake of the ending, that he knew before he started it that he had the absolutely right conclusion waiting for him in the memorial seance for Sir Arthur at the Royal Albert Hall. And the author does full justice to the setting, the great hall filled to capacity, a spiritualist onstage along with Sir Arthur's empty chair, and George looking down on the scene from one of the upper tiers. It's a natural, a perfect set piece, but for it to reach the highest level, to become great, it has to be witnessed by the man Sir Arthur "saved" (the irony of that "saved" is another good reason to read the book). Seen by an omniscient author it might have had a certain impact. Seen by George, who is touchingly alive to us, whose mind we know, whose eyes we see it through thanks to the author's painstaking creation of him, the scene lives up to all its best possibilities and stands as one of the most memorable endings in contemporary fiction.