The books are very different. The Sherlockian is a thriller
and it is entirely fictional. Barnes’
book is a more literary,
historical
novel based on real events. If he had
been writing a thriller, the story would have started when Doyle got involved
in overturning the wrongful conviction of solicitor George Adelji
for mutilating and killing animals
in the rural community where he was raised by a Scottish mother
and an Indian
father who converted to Anglicanism and
served as a vicar. This doesn’t occur
until you’ve already read 70 percent of the book. Barnes doesn’t indulge the achronologic order
a novel permits, but he does take his time, gets into the heads of his
protagonists, and takes a long look at side stories. This is why I refer to it as a literary novel
in contrast to a thriller, which is more to-the-point and plot driven.
I wonder why Barnes decided to write a novel instead of a nonfiction
account of the events. I suspect there
was plenty of source material. Doyle was
a prolific writer. Newspapers
abounded in England
at the time. Clues to the truth can be
found in even the most obfuscatory court and government
documents. The Adelji case led to new laws, including
the introduction of appeals courts to the British criminal
justice system. I suspect he wanted to
explore themes that interested him without too strictly bound to a factual
narrative.
There is the suggestion of a theme in the opening chapters. Doyle and Adelji are introduced through their
childhood exposures to death, something
that would have been common in the 1800s. Doyle famously became a spiritualist. He was committed to the idea that death was
passage into another life and that gifted people could communicate with the
departed. I do not know if Adelji’s
views are on the record, but Barnes depicts him as something between neutral and
skeptical. He also seems indifferent and
uncurious. The only fact he is sure of
is that everyone dies. What happens
after death, if anything, is unknown, and he finds the evidence of an afterlife
to be weak. These views are not
contrasted; they are juxtaposed.
Ethics
may be another theme. Doyle derived his
ethical view from his notions of chivalry. Adelji, who comes across as a
high-functioning person with Asperger’s
syndrome, found his place in the order and logic of the law. There was plenty of unethical activity, or at
least human venality, presented in the story: racism, eugenic notions,
sloppy police work, unjust courts, and heel-dragging bureaucrats.
I might have preferred a straight nonfiction account of the
events. Barnes novelization worked for
me, though. It was certainly more
effective than the partial fictionalization attempted by David
Gelernter in his history
of the 1939 World’s Fair.
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