Bookplanet: why nobody in the US has to read the new Julian Barnes novel

Respected British novelist Julian Barnes has a new novel out, ARTHUR AND GEORGE. Well-received in England; in line for all the great prizes. But here in the US, we're lucky. We don't have to read it. Why? Because NY Times reviewer Michiko Kakutani has read it for us, and she is not impressed. When she pans a book, she really puts it away. Take a gander.

Sherlock's Creator Gives Sleuthing a Try -- by MICHIKO KAKUTANI

The Arthur in Julian Barnes's new novel is Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, the creator of Sherlock Holmes. The George in the novel is one George Edalji, a half-Indian solicitor who was convicted in 1903 of mutilating farm animals in his rural parish. And the tale Mr. Barnes recounts is the real-life-inspired story of how Arthur took up George's case and by playing detective tried to restore George's good name.

Readers familiar with Mr. Barnes's earlier work - his sly, fictional improvisation on the life of Gustave Flaubert ("Flaubert's Parrot") or his highly subjective, collage-like history of the world ("A History of the World in 101/2 Chapters") - might have expected him to use the story of Arthur and George as an armature for some sophisticated, postmodernist games or as the jumping-off point for philosophical musings about, say, the gaps between life and art or the difficulty of understanding the past. Instead, Mr. Barnes has decided to write a straight-ahead historical novel - a task he completes in a clumsy and lugubrious fashion.

Though "Arthur & George" is smoothly written and professionally assembled, it's a ponderous performance - crammed full of historical research and re-creations of period details and overstuffed with evidence relating to George's legal case. Perhaps Mr. Barnes has gone into such minute detail in an effort to show just how George was railroaded in the first place or how cleverly Arthur has tracked down evidence to exonerate him. Or perhaps Mr. Barnes simply wanted to cram into these pages all the evidence his own research turned up. Whatever the intent, it's a strategy that backfires: the reader doesn't experience the thrill of putting together clues - the way one does when reading a good detective story - but instead feels bombarded by a blizzard of boring bits of data.

We learn far more than we could possibly want to know about the farm animals found with their guts slashed open in the parish of Great Wyrley. We learn far more than we could possibly want to know about the threatening and bigoted letters received by George's family in the years before the animal mutilations. And we learn far more than we could possibly want to know about the atrocious behavior of the local police, who seem to have had it in for George from the beginning.

The sections where this novel does take flight are those in which Mr. Barnes seems to have taken imaginative liberties, fleshing out gaps in the historical record or simply embroidering known facts: George's sheltered, hermetic childhood; Arthur's efforts over a decade to sustain relationships with two women (his invalid wife, Touie, and a younger woman named Jean, with whom he falls madly in love); the title characters' prickly relationship, which grew out of desperation on George's part and missionary zeal on Arthur's. In such passages, the new emotional depth that surfaced in Mr. Barnes's recent collection "The Lemon Table" slips into view, lending the story an intimacy and psychological tension that the remainder of the novel sadly lacks.

As depicted by Mr. Barnes, Arthur and George emerge as full-blown romantics and old-fashioned men of honor. Shy, diffident and immensely dignified, George refuses to believe that racism might have played a role in his arrest and conviction, and as a lawyer he clings to his faith in the courts, convinced, at least at the beginning of his ordeal, that justice will prevail.

Arthur, who grew up on stories of King Arthur and his Round Table, wants to live up to chivalric ideals. He sees his life as a series of knightly quests, and while he feels burdened by his reputation as the creator of Sherlock Holmes, he decides to put his fame to good use: he sets out not only to prove George's innocence and win him restitution, but also to identify the real miscreant who committed the crimes in the first place.

"I am going to make a great deal of noise," he tells George. "The English - the official English - do not like noise. They think it vulgar; it embarrasses them. But if calm reason has not worked, I shall give them noisy reason. I shall not use the back stairs but the front steps. I shall bang a big drum."

In real life, George's case - as championed by Arthur - will be compared to the Dreyfus affair and will make English legal history, helping to lead to the establishment of a Court of Appeals. As raw material for this historical novel, however, it makes for less than compelling reading, resulting in a serviceable but decidedly sluggish book.