Shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize, 2005.
A Richard and Judy Book Club Selection.
This novel is based on Arthur Conan Doyle's extraordinary real-life
fight for justice. Arthur and George grow up worlds and miles apart in
late 19th-century Britain: Arthur in shabby-genteel Edinburgh, George in
the vicarage of a small Staffordshire village. Arthur becomes a doctor,
and then a writer, George a solicitor in Birmingham. Arthur is to become
one of the most famous men of his age; George remains in hardworking
obscurity. But as the new century begins, they are brought together by a
sequence of events which made sensational headlines at the time as The
Great Wyrley Outrages.
George Edjali's father is Indian, his mother Scottish. When the family
begins to receive vicious anonymous letters, many about their son, they
put it down to racial prejudice. They appeal to the police, to no less
than the Chief Constable, but to their dismay he appears to suspect
George of being the letters' author. Then someone starts slashing horses
and livestock. Again the police seem to suspect the shy, aloof
Birmingham solicitor. He is arrested and, on the flimsiest evidence,
sent to trial, found guilty and sentenced to seven years' hard labour.
Arthur Conan Doyle, famous as the creator of the world's greatest
detective, is mourning his first wife (having been chastely in love for
10 years with the woman who was to become his second) when he hears
about the Edjali case. Incensed at this obvious miscarriage of justice,
he is galvanised into trying to clear George's name. With a mixture of
detailed research and vivid imagination, Julian Barnes brings to life
not just this long-forgotten case but the inner lives of these two very
different men.
