‘Arthur & George’ A Review: Conan Doyle’s War on Injustice By Dorothy Rabinowitz
http://www.wsj.com/articles/arthur-george-review-conan-doyles-war-on-injustice-1441316996
In this Masterpiece Mystery! drama, Arthur Conan Doyle tries to clear the name of a man convicted of brutal crimes in the English Midlands.
This three-part drama about Arthur Conan Doyle’s dedicated battle to undo a gross legal injustice begins inauspiciously, with a strangely flat and wandering first episode, then goes on to become a work of stirring suspensefulness and passion that is sustained to the end. It’s a transformation that owes much to the powers of the well-documented story of George Edalji (Arsher Ali), a young Anglo-Indian solicitor living in the English Midlands, accused of heinous acts of cruelty against farm animals. Their horrifically mutilated bodies led to the case known forever after as the Great Wyrley Outrages.
“Arthur & George,” a Masterpiece Mystery! based on Julian Barnes’s 2005 novel of the same name, centers on the role of Conan Doyle (Martin Clunes) as he sets forth on his effort to prove Edalji’s innocence. In what is perhaps the least persuasive aspect of this story, Conan Doyle, portrayed as a man driven by deep emotional need, instantly decides to take the case on in the interest of righting a wrong.
Those interested will find a far more convincing portrait of a man driven by conscience, and rage, in the remarkably detailed exposé Conan Doyle wrote for the Telegraph in 1907. Edalji was, by this time, a free man, having been paroled after three years’ imprisonment. He was not free, however, to practice law, his life’s cherished work. Conan Doyle saw in him a man who had had taken from him, by prejudice and corrupt authority, all that he had cared for in life. It was, Conan Doyle wrote, a kind of squalid Dreyfus case. The parallel was extraordinarily close, he noted, except that here “You have a Parsee instead of a Jew.”
The Conan Doyle of this series has considerable charm as played by Mr. Clunes, though that takes some time to emerge from the effects of episode one, packed with ghastly images—those mutilated farm animals—and heavy-breathing Victorian horror atmospherics. Then there’s the bombast that results from the effort to supply reasons for Conan Doyle’s decision to prove that Edalji had been falsely convicted. The script accordingly calls for the renowned creator of Sherlock Holmes to be depicted as a grieving husband tormented not only by the imminent loss of his devoted wife, but also by his feelings of guilt over his attachment to another woman, Jean Leckie (Hattie Morahan). That’s in addition to our introduction to Conan Doyle as a trumpeter of his own noble instincts to do right—so noble that he accuses himself, repeatedly, of being an adulterer, while his nearest and dearest emphatically assure him he is not. They have a point. His relations with the other woman have been, and will remain for years, entirely pure.
Things settle down effectively as Conan Doyle and his engagingly understated secretary, Alfred Wood (Charles Edwards), pursue clues, none of which turn up an answer to the enigma represented by George Edalji himself and his family. Whether pained or grateful, in rage or triumphant, George is expressionless, unreadable. He is the most intriguing of all the characters in this drama full of bustling and ebullience, thanks to Mr. Ali’s uncompromisingly controlled, wooden presence. That isn’t to say he’s without feeling or warmth, which find their expression, spare though it is, in words, and oddly eloquent ones. He’s an English gentleman through and through, all he’s ever wanted to be.
No less intriguing is his father, Shapurji Edalji—Parsee convert to Christianity, vicar of a Church of England parish, and too infrequently onscreen here. He’s played by the ever admirable Art Malik, one reason you never take your eyes off this clergyman.
Eyes have, in other ways, a good deal to do with this story. It was George Edalji’s extreme myopia and other obvious vision problems that Conan Doyle—who had been a practicing ophthalmologist—first noticed, the immediate indicator that Edalji would have been incapable of grappling in darkness with horses and cows, and carving them up. There were any number of other indicators of Edalji’s innocence, and of the prosecutorial fanaticism that ensured all of them would be ignored—a history “Arthur & George” reveals with sterling clarity.
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