![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
Arthur & George by Julian Barnes
Dec. 12th, 2009 01:04 pmThe Blurb On The Back:
Arthur and George grew up worlds apart in late nineteenth-century Britain: Arthur in shabby-genteel Edinburgh, George in the vicarage of a small Staffordshire village. Arthur becomes a doctor, then a writer; George a solicitor in Birmingham. Arthur is to become one of the most famous men of his age, while George remains a hard-working obscurity. But as the new century begins, they are brought together by a sequence of events that made sensational headlines at the time as The Great Wyrley Outrages.
With a mixture of intense research and vivid imagination, Julian Barnes brings to life not just this long-forgotten case, but the inner workings of these two very different men. This is a novel in which the events of a hundred years ago constantly set off contemporary echoes, a novel about low crime and high spirituality, guilt and innocence, identity, nationality and race. Most of all it is a profound and moving meditation on the fateful differences between what we believe, what we know and what we can prove.
( The Review (Cut For Spoilers): )
The Verdict:
An absorbing character study that draws on a true story to frame its plot, this is an absorbing character study with a real sense of period and well worth a read.
Arthur and George grew up worlds apart in late nineteenth-century Britain: Arthur in shabby-genteel Edinburgh, George in the vicarage of a small Staffordshire village. Arthur becomes a doctor, then a writer; George a solicitor in Birmingham. Arthur is to become one of the most famous men of his age, while George remains a hard-working obscurity. But as the new century begins, they are brought together by a sequence of events that made sensational headlines at the time as The Great Wyrley Outrages.
With a mixture of intense research and vivid imagination, Julian Barnes brings to life not just this long-forgotten case, but the inner workings of these two very different men. This is a novel in which the events of a hundred years ago constantly set off contemporary echoes, a novel about low crime and high spirituality, guilt and innocence, identity, nationality and race. Most of all it is a profound and moving meditation on the fateful differences between what we believe, what we know and what we can prove.
( The Review (Cut For Spoilers): )
The Verdict:
An absorbing character study that draws on a true story to frame its plot, this is an absorbing character study with a real sense of period and well worth a read.
