The case of the innocent man

THESE days, the formidable Sir Arthur Conan Doyle (1859-1930) suffers the curious fate of being less famous than his fictional creation Sherlock Holmes. This, however, was not always so. Although Doyle did indeed first gain fame as the author of those remarkable detective stories, in his lifetime he was also well known as a man of many parts, as is evident in the account of his memorial service given in Julian Barnes’ carefully researched and marvelously insightful new novel, “Arthur & George”:

“Many people knew Doyle the writer, Doyle the dramatist, Doyle the traveller, Doyle the boxer, Doyle the cricketer.... But greater than any of these was the Doyle who pleaded for justice when the innocent were made to suffer.”

Not content with creating a fictional hero who doggedly pursued truth whatever the cost, Doyle himself took on the role of detective -- and prisoners’ advocate -- in two criminal cases to ferret out the truth and redress grave miscarriages of justice. The first, which Barnes’ novel centers on, was the Edalji case, which, in the early 1900s, was as renowned in Britain as the Dreyfus affair was in France a decade earlier. The victim of injustice was a quiet, self-effacing Birmingham solicitor named George Edalji, son of a gentle Scotswoman and a devoutly religious Church of England clergyman who was Indian. As in the case of Alfred Dreyfus, a military officer who was Jewish, prejudice was a major issue. Both men were accused of crimes they had not committed. Both were victims of plots to frame them. And in both cases, two innocent men served time in prison not because of what they were accused of doing but because of who they were. Yet Edalji, like Dreyfus, was so thoroughly a loyal citizen of his country that he found it almost impossible to believe his race had been an issue.

Even before Doyle took up his cause in 1906, Edalji had his supporters. He had been released from prison that year after serving three years of a seven-year sentence but was living under a cloud because there had been no pardon or any kind of admission that he had been wrongly convicted. It was at this point that the famous creator of Sherlock Holmes entered the fray. Having read the case dossier and met with Edalji in person, Doyle came to a firm conclusion. Barnes’ rendition of this crucial moment in both men’s lives movingly encapsulates a theme that resounds throughout this novel:

“They had stood to say good-bye, and Sir Arthur had towered over him, and this large, forceful, gentle man had looked him in the eye and said, ‘I do not think you are innocent. I do not believe you are innocent. I know you are innocent.’ The words were more than a poem, more than a prayer, they were the expression of a truth against which lies would break.”

Barnes is superbly equipped to handle the challenging task he has set himself in his latest novel. The range of his previous work is impressive, including the engaging contemporary comedy of his debut novel, “Metroland,” and the highly original blend of fiction and literary criticism in “Flaubert’s Parrot.”

“Arthur & George” is an ambitious undertaking: a portrait of two lives, a window on an era and an urgent, eternally relevant tale about human verities. Barnes gives us not just an absorbing fictional re-creation of a real-life detective story but also an affirmation and celebration of the search for truth and justice. His book is a finely evocative historical novel as well as a morally and psychologically astute glimpse into the worlds of two men. He tells the story chronologically, interweaving scenes from each man’s childhood, youth and adult life, leading up to the moment of their meeting, then onward to Doyle’s death in 1930 and Edalji’s in 1953.

Although blessed with a keen sense of irony, Barnes never makes the mistake of patronizing his characters or condescending to the mores of an earlier era. Raised on stirring tales of knightly chivalry told him by his mother, Doyle is imbued with noble ideals for the remainder of his life and is deeply convinced of his mother’s wisdom -- he continues to confide in her, even at the age of 38, when he falls in love with a woman who is not his wife.

Barnes’ delicate irony cuts two ways: at Doyle, for not realizing that his mother is less than perfect, but even more at our own era for smugly reducing a rather wonderful parent-child relationship to “the Oedipus complex.” In his portrait of Edalji, a clever, timorous fellow dedicated to his legal studies, Barnes shows us how prejudice against nearsighted, unathletic nerds may well have played as large a part in convicting him as did prejudice against skin color. Somehow, Edalji’s very virtues come to be held against him as evidence of an “unmanly” character and a “devious” mind.

Barnes’ portrait of Doyle reveals the inner consistency beneath the seeming contradictions: We come to see how the sense of honor and chivalry he imbibed from his mother is in no way at odds with his belief in the scientific method, instilled in the course of his medical studies by his mentor, Dr. Joseph Bell. Later, we are shown how his growing interest in spiritualism is not a flight from rationality but an open-minded investigation of the unknown, undertaken in the spirit of scientific research, even if inspired by the hope of preserving a belief in the soul in an increasingly materialist world.

Despite his pious upbringing, Edalji finds himself unable to believe in any kind of religion. Even as a child, we are told, he lacked imagination. His lodestar is truth, and later, when training as a solicitor, the rules of evidence. Until he is betrayed by it, he has complete confidence in the British legal system. “Sobriety” might well be this man’s middle name. But although he’s a far less colorful fellow than Doyle, he is brilliantly brought to life by Barnes, who reveals the hidden depths of his character.

Attending Doyle’s huge memorial service at London’s Royal Albert Hall, feeling a bit out of place among an audience largely composed of Doyle’s fellow spiritualists, Edalji has an epiphany. He is suddenly struck by the fact that everybody, sooner or later, is going to be dead:

“[H]e looked about him.... [T]hat woman with a parasol would be dead, and her mother next to her dead sooner ... and those two dogs with them would also be dead ... and the baby in the perambulator, even if it lived to be as old as the oldest inhabitant on the planet....

“And though George was now nearing the limit of his imagination, he continued a little further. If you knew someone who had died, then you could think about them in one of two ways: as being dead, extinguished utterly, with the death of the body the test and proof that their self, their essence, their individuality, no longer existed; or you could believe that somewhere, somehow ... they were still alive, either in a way predicted by sacred texts, or in some way we had yet to comprehend. It was one or the other; there was no position of compromise; and George was privately inclined to think extinction the more probable. But when you stood in Hyde Park on a warm summer’s afternoon among thousands of other human beings, few of whom were probably thinking about being dead, it was less easy to believe that this intense and complex thing called life was merely some chance happening on an obscure planet, a brief moment of light between two eternities of darkness. At such a moment it was possible to feel that all this vitality must continue somehow, somewhere.”

Barnes’ imaginative re-creation of Arthur’s and George’s life stories is a reminder that human vitality continues through literature. *