Julian Barnes: Blending genres photo: Ellen Warner Arthur & George By Julian Barnes Knopf, 386 pp., $24.95 more books most popular most commented Personal Days by Elizabeth Hand The Flash Press: Sporting Male Weeklies in 1840s New York by Tom Robbins Welcome to New York Comic Con by Carol Cooper A Voice Poetry Roundup by Alan Gilbert Etgar Keret's Short-Story Overload by Michelle Orange Girls Love Gay Male Porn Pucker Up by Tristan Taormino My Boyfriend's Kink Is Getting Fat. What Do I Do? Savage Love by Dan Savage Sex and the City Spoilers: A Sneak Preview of What Really Happens to Carrie and the Girls by Lynn Yaeger Our Favorite Writers Pick Their Favorite Obscure Books Summer Guide by ALEXANDER NAZARYAN The Barely Legal Empire of Tony Alamo by Maria Luisa Tucker NYPD Inaction Over a Missing Black Woman Found Dead Sparks a Historic Racial-Bias Lawsuit (9) Sean Gardiner Devo-Inspired Art in East Williamsburg (8) Maro The Barely Legal Empire of Tony Alamo (5) Maria Luisa Tucker David Mamet: Why I Am No Longer a 'Brain-Dead Liberal' (4) David Mamet Runnin' Scared: Deep South of Houston: Is a Soul-Food Restaurant Too Black for Soho? (4) Runnin' Scared: Chloe A. Hilliard

In 1903, Edalji, the son of a Parsi turned Anglican clergyman and his English wife, was convicted of the ghastly crime of "cattle ripping," the exsanguinations of horses and cows via a vicious slash to the belly. Public outcry led to Edalji's early release, but the government offered him no compensation or pardon, leaving Edalji unable to return to his beloved profession of solicitor. Conan Doyle, accustomed to writing of detectives rather than playing one, took up the Edalji case in an effort to lighten the "days of darkness" following his wife's death. The crusade would eventually result in the long-overdue establishment of England's Criminal Court of Appeals.

That arresting initial glimpse, in which Conan Doyle at once deduces Edalji's severe myopia as well as his dark skin and unharmonious features (exophthalmic eyes, jowliness), occurs late in Julian Barnes's Booker-short-listed novel Arthur & George. More than half the book passes before the characters meet or even hear of one another. The intervening chapters detail the men's various childhoods, adult careers, and in the case of Arthur, amours: Barnes suggests Conan Doyle required the stimulation of the Edalji case to effect his second marriage and its consummation. Section headings announce the name of the man discussed, and, as in a friendly game of badminton, Barnes chucks the birdie of third-person omniscient narration cheerfully back and forth between them. For the author of Flaubert's Parrot, such formal sport is positively restrained.

A deft blend of genres—thriller, courtroom drama, biography, romance— Arthur & George never proves less than dexterous. As in previous books, Barnes negotiates the actual and the imagined effortlessly. And yet, there's a hollowness, or perhaps hermeticism, at the novel's core. Sherlock Holmes and his creator have made frequent appearances in books of the last couple years, and this one, too, can seem an exercise in homage or ventriloquism rather than an autonomous effort. Still, Barnes's affection for the diffident solicitor Edalji, who stubbornly refuses to chalk up his ordeal to "race prejudice," and the overgrown schoolboy Conan Doyle, who all but dons a deerstalker in pursuit of justice, isn't derivative—or elementary—in the least.