Eminently put-down-able. Really not grabbing me at all.

Merged review:

Eminently put-down-able. Really not grabbing me at all.

I really enjoyed this book (though the George sections were more engrossing than the Arthur ones for me). Part courtroom drama, part crime-mystery, totally a page turner!

I guess I can still call this "currently" reading. I've been reading it for months and had heard such great things about it. And so I kept slogging away because I keep thinking I'm going to enjoy it more. But that hasn't happened yet...don't know if I am going to keep going or not.

I didn't quite know what to expect when I picked up this book other than historical fiction with a bit of a mystery. I was pleasantly surprised!

One of the most effective things about this book is the way it switches between the point of view characters. We mostly stay with Arthur and George, but occasionally we get some other POV that is important for carrying the narrative forward. I usually only include a POV if that character has an arc and I’m going to stay with them for a long time, but in a mystery/procedural (which this largely is), the plot rules a little more heavily than every POV character getting an arc.

George’s character in particular is expertly crafted in just a handful of lines that say so much about him. “It may seem a harmless game to place a penny on the rail and see it flattened to twice its diameter by a passing express; but George regards it as a slippery slope which leads to train wrecking” (p 63). I love this because we get George’s view of rules and rules breaking here along with his exactness (“flattened to twice its diameter”). It's a perfect summation of some of George's key personality traits.

I also really enjoyed how this book handled racism, since some people look at the circumstances and say, “Clearly race is involved,” while other people (namely the one suffering the injustice) insist that race isn’t a factor. It was very cool to see the varying points of view, especially in a way that feels somewhat inverted.

Julian Barnes' Arthur & George (2005) is a wonderful novel, I think of interest to Sherlock Holmes fans. The novel is told from the points of view of both Arthur Conan Doyle and George Edalji, the half-Indian solicitor who was wrongfully convicted of the "Great Wyrley Outrages", a series of animal mutilations in a rural area. The lives of both men are contrasted, Barnes using a different style for each (Doyle's is literary, while the simpler George is all present tense) and they in fact do not meet until late in the book. Awesomely researched, lightly comic and a real page turner when you get to the trial and Doyle's later investigations, Barnes produces here tw superb character studies based on available sources. I haven't enjoyed one of his novels this much since, oh, my very first touch of Barnes (and I've nearly read them all), A History of the World in 10½ Chapters.

, kunne fort blitt 5 hvis den hadde vært litt strammere redigert.

I got interested enough to finish this book but almost quit multiple times. No point to the story, no real resolution of the conflict, boring as hell to get through the prose and style of storytelling

4.5/5
This was a very good, singular book. Now, I've seen many reviews that were disappointed with the ending. I believe that it was a decent one, given the circumstances and the persisting mystery of it all. The author's note helped clear things up, so one would be advised to read that if the conclusion was unsatisfying. As for the whole of the work. It was a fantastic cross section of English life at the time, detailing the lives of two very different men with very different views of the world, which came clearest during their collisions and views of each other. It was fascinating to get a taste of the background of the author of Sherlock Holmes, to see how greatly the character affected the author in reputation as well as in mannerisms. Not to mention the whole mystery of the book, which crept up in a slow unrelenting fashion until the reader's mind was consumed; never realizing the shift from daily life observations and meandering thoughts to detective work and rampant cross-firing of rival opinions. The strings of logic and reasoning were laid out in a smooth and steady manner, and never hindered nor unreasonably sped up the general pace of the story. I would have to say, if people choose not to read this book because they read the reviews detailing the unsatisfactory ending, they are definitely missing out on a most unique mystery, interwoven with life and patterns of thought and a current of analysis that starts with a body and ends with a spirit.