I can’t remember if this book was a considered choice by my book group, or whether it was foisted upon us. Either way I was pleasantly surprised. It is a long time since I have read any Julian Barnes. Certainly three of his titles are familiar, but I cannot say with any certainty that I have ever finished one. For a while I thought this might go the same way, but once the idea behind the novel came into focus there was no turning back.
The book is divided into four parts, and the first part switches frequently between the accounts of the early lives of two disparate young men, Arthur and George. Being unable to see any connection between the two, and finding in the text little other than character development, did not constitute a beginning of unmitigated excitement. The reader who had read the back cover would, however, know that this is leading into a reconstruction of a true and (then) notorious event which occurred in Staffordshire in the very early nineteenth century, involving Arthur Conan Doyle and the less famous George Edalji.
At some point this twin biography becomes a detective story in earnest, but the astute reader will have already applied their powers of deduction to some effect. For the less astute reader, a retrospective examination will reveal that the identity of Arthur might have been deduced before Barnes renders it unmistakable, and that there are also portents and red herrings for the ensuing intrigue.
The second part is named ‘Beginning with an Ending,’ in which the nature of The Great Wyrley Outrages is revealed; and attributed, in a court of law, to George.
Subsequently Arthur becomes involved, a knight-errant in pursuit of justice.
As the story proceeds the connections between Arthur and George become apparent, in the form of shared experience or contrast. The derivation of their present circumstances from past lives is also illustrated in each case.
‘ “He felt himself in a terrible cage surrounded by iron bars. When would he ever escape? When would he ever achieve any kind of sexual fulfillment? In my view, a continuous period of sexual frustration, year after year after year, can start to turn a man’s mind, Doyle. He can end up worshipping strange gods, and performing strange rites.” ‘
One of the main themes is the construction of narrative. Firstly in Arthur’s creation of Sherlock Holmes, a process which he then attempts to apply to solving George’s real life conundrum. ‘Beginning with an Ending’ is a part of this process, which is mocked by the police, despite their obvious vulnerability to the same fallacious methodology. There are several other instances of characters drawing inferences from circumstantial material, here Wood, Arthur’s right hand man, reflects on the nature of Arthur’s second wife to be:
‘Miss Leckie made considerable play of being natural, of seeming at times to be reining in with difficulty a great instinctive warmth; but it struck Wood as being a kind of coquetry.’
Wood arrives at this unflattering conclusion about the actions of the woman with no apparent justification. The reader in turn may castigate Wood as misogynistic with little more cause. The reader draws conclusions from the multiple layers of largely circumstantial inference depicted by the author: his own, that formulated by his characters, and the facsimile evidence from the trial which is also included.
In this way the reading experience mirrors not only the nature of Barnes’ research and subsequent narrative construction, but also the flawed deductive methods of the characters within the book. I have it on good authority (well, goodish) that there is no metafiction here. While I must defer to a higher authority, I enjoyed this metafictional hint at potential genre subversion, which takes the form of a conversation between Arthur and the Chief Constable, Anson:
‘ “Then let me ask you this. What, in your opinion, really happened?”
Anson laughed, rather too openly. “That I’m afraid, is a question from detective fiction. It is what your readers beg, and what you so winningly provide. Tell us what really happened.” ‘
It’s a long time since I read any Sherlock Holmes, and I wish I had read more, and recently, in order to address that facet of this novel, but Arthur, unwillingly, becomes his creation during parts of the story. Here, abruptly questioning George.
‘ “Do you know the exact value of your myopia? Six, seven dioptres? I am only guessing, of course.”
George is startled by this first question.’
It certainly reminded me of Sherlock Holmes, but I will try to resist persistent references to metafiction. I am also avoiding, with some difficulty, the word ‘elementary;’ to date, at least, with commendable success…
George does not share the suppositional and creative world view shared by nearly every other character. George sifts facts and draws only incontrovertible conclusions, a modus operandi which well befits his occupation as a solicitor. George is also myopic, a condition, both physical and metaphorical, which may be said to contribute on both fronts to his difficulties. George, lacking evidence for a racial dimension to the prejudice against him, is unable to entertain that possibility. The irony is that were George’s circumstances examined with similar rigour the case against him would not exist.
A further theme of the book is innocence and guilt. George is accounted guilty, in part for the unrelated things which are known about him; whereas Arthur believes that he himself may not be guilty, providing certain things are not known. The question of what can be known is a vexed one throughout:
‘ “Jean does love you, Arthur. I am quite certain of it. I know her. […]”
“I think she does. I believe she does. How can I know she does? That’s the question that tears at me when this mood descends. I think it, I believe it, but how can I ever know it? If only I could prove it, if either of us could prove it.” ‘
A rather strange sub-plot involves Sir Arthur’s involvement with spiritualism and seances which, ultimately, in a huge leap of character development, George begins to grasp:
The eyes of faith. […] His champion’s words: I do not think, I do not believe, I know. Sir Arthur carried with him an enviable, comforting sense of certainty. He knew things. What does he, George, know? Does he finally know anything? What is the sum of knowledge he has acquired in his fifty-four years? Mostly, he has gone through his life learning and waiting to be told. The authority of others has always been important to him; does he have any authority of his own? At fifty-four, he thinks a lot of things, he believes a few, but what can he really claim to know?
George may perhaps not be prepared to admit as much, but the novel seems to conclude that ‘knowing’ consists of a large portion of belief with a generous side-serving of faith.
This is a novel that came to me on the strength of recommendations from two sources (and that’s not even counting the Booker judges) but it was not recommended unreservedly by both parties. The matter upon which my acquaintances did, if to varying degrees, agree was a connection between Sense of an Ending and McEwan’s On Chesil Beach. 
A Rat in the Book Pile 