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Outstanding
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Entertainment Weekly Jennifer Reese
A stout, satisfying, and uncharacteristically old-fashioned novel.
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Outstanding
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LA Weekly Brendan Bernhard
Will Barnes ever write a dull or mediocre novel? On the strength of this one and all the others that preceded it, the prospect seems increasingly unlikely.
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Outstanding
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Washington Post Michael Dirda
Barnes's writing is, as usual, masterly throughout Arthur & George, not only as the pages shift from one man's consciousness to the other's but also in the way their author keeps the reader on edge.
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Outstanding
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Daily Telegraph Caroline Moore
[Arthur & George] is both meticulously researched and vividly imagined, both gripping and thoughtful.
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Outstanding
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The Globe And Mail [Toronto] Zsuzsi Gardner
Using mere kitchen scraps of historical information, [Barnes] has added marrow, muscles, nerves and a pumping heart to a footnote in British legal history, animated long-interred bones in a way no biography ever could. [8 Oct 2005]
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Outstanding
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The Guardian Tim Adams
Julian Barnes... has taken the bones of a long-dead history and imbued them with vivid and memorable life.
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Outstanding
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The Independent Simon O'Hagan
It's one of Barnes's best, a beautiful and engrossing work which brings together some classic Barnesian themes (love, identity), introduces some new ones (spirituality, guilt and innocence), and hangs them all on a real-life miscarriage of justice from 100 years ago that was always going to be a gift for the first writer to spot its potential for re-imagining.
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Outstanding
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Atlantic Monthly Elizabeth Judd
Arthur & George succeeds as an effortlessly gripping detective novel, a stirring morality tale, and an inspired riff on the fault lines threatening the English and their centuries of unshakable self-regard.
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Outstanding
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Christian Science Monitor Marjorie Kehe
This engaging tale is as pleasing a read as they come, and yet it is also the chance to admire the skillful work of a top contemporary novelist.
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Outstanding
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The Onion A.V. Club Noel Murray
Barnes has a terrific story to tell, and he doesn't muck it up.
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Outstanding
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Booklist Donna Seaman
Barnes turns this historically based tale of prejudice, malevolence, and madness versus honor, stoicism, and ingenuity into a brilliantly incisive and emotionally powerful inquiry into the nature of delusion and hope, perception and interpretation. [1 Jan 2006, p. 22]
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Outstanding
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Kirkus Reviews
[Barnes's] past novels have been praised for their brilliance but occasionally faulted for a dry style overburdened with detail. Here, with a mystery at the heart of the narrative, every detail is a potential, welcome clue. [1 Oct 2005, p. 1041]
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Outstanding
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Publishers Weekly
A triumph of storytelling. [7 Nov 2005, p. 47]
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Outstanding
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San Francisco Chronicle Heller McAlpin
Barnes' novel contains as many facets as a well-cut diamond.
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Outstanding
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Salon Laura Miller
The mingling of a little detection into the literary author's work has produced his most substantial novel yet.
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Outstanding
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New York Review Of Books John Lanchester
[Arthur & George] balances a certain formal tension... with a richer, three-dimensional fictional world; there is a great deal in it of factual interest, but this is blended with the fully imagined inner worlds of good fiction. It is not a playful book, but it is not without humor. Both its jokes and its sadnesses are earned.
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Favorable
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TLS: The Times Literary Supplement Jon Barnes
Julian Barnes has given us a quieter novel full of the unsatisfactory loose ends and petty injustices of real life, one that the placid, gentle George Edalji, turning the cream-coloured pages by the fireside, might have better appreciated and understood--and one by which he would have been thrilled and flattered and moved beyond words.
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Favorable
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Chicago Sun-Times Annie Tully
Anyone looking for a bit of Sherlockian adventure will be pleased with Barnes' tale as well.
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Favorable
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The Independent Andrew Taylor
For most of the time this beguiling and enormously readable novel seduces us into believing it all makes sense.
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Favorable
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London Review Of Books Theo Tait
The chances are that readers will be gripped, charmed and amused--but may feel a nagging "so what?" loom as they near the end.
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Favorable
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Los Angeles Times Merle Rubin
Barnes' imaginative re-creation of Arthur's and George's life stories is a reminder that human vitality continues through literature. [15 Jan 2006]
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Favorable
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The Economist
Julian Barnes's new novel is a departure. Don't expect a dance of ideas or a virtuosic concert of voices. Not that they're exactly missing, but there is less sparkle. Aptly so, perhaps. Of the book's two heroes, the more heroic is the one who loves railway timetables.
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Favorable
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Wall Street Journal John Freeman
"Arthur & George" accomplishes more than opening up the lives of two men drawn into a system's cruel machinery. The book shows how essential, and difficult, it is to imagine the pain that the law can inflict.
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Favorable
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The New York Times Book Review Terrence Rafferty
"Arthur and George" conceals its contemplation of the imponderables slyly, discreetly hiding it behind the curtains while scenes of Dickensian force and color play out in firelit rooms. Barnes narrates in a preternaturally calm, controlled third person, alternating skillfully between Arthur and George.
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Mixed
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Village Voice Alexis Soloski
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.
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Mixed
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The New York Times Michiko Kakutani
A serviceable but decidedly sluggish book.
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Mixed
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Boston Globe Gail Caldwell
The results are mostly admirable, as Barnes has created brilliantly intimate portraits of two men whose crossed paths will define them both. But perhaps because ''Arthur & George" is a piece of rich history transformed into fiction, it also suffers from its own excesses.
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Mixed
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The Guardian Natasha Walter
Although this novel is never less than intelligent, it is rarely much more than that either.
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Mixed
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The Spectator Sebastian Smee
The whole book is thoroughly involving and full of particulars. But somehow I came to the end of it feeling that some kind of clinching artifice--something beyond wonderful writing and great sensitivity that might have transformed the tale and lifted it onto the plane of art--had been approached but not quite achieved.
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Mixed
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The Nation Terry Eagleton
There is a great deal to be admired in this lucid, sophisticated narrative, but one can see why it didn't win the Man Booker Prize.
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Mixed
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Chicago Tribune Art Winslow
"Arthur & George" is not freehand fiction, since it is limited in ways by the historical record, and at times one feels Barnes' imaginative sense has been constrained by that too. [29 Jan 2006]
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Unfavorable
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New York Observer David Thomson
What an ending there might be if Holmes himself, or Holmesian deductive lightning, were suddenly found to be crazed or wrong. But Julian Barnes dodges that moment in a book where he’s persuaded himself to sound like Dr. Watson. [16 Jan 2006, p. 21]
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Unfavorable
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Daily Telegraph Lewis Jones
How can so light and playful a writer have written so dull a book? He might have had such fun. Instead, he plods through rough acres of exposition, editorialising humourlessly as he goes.
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