Arthur and George grow up in late Victorian England. One is a curious and imaginative child who awaits the wonders of the world without ever considering its limitations. The other is the quiet, reserved son of a village vicar who seems bound by life's restrictions before experiencing happiness. Arthur will become one of the world's best-known writers while George, after modest success as a solicitor, will be convicted of maiming farm animals in 1903.

	"ARTHUR & GEORGE" By Julian Barnes Knopf ($24.95)

Geographically close, their personal experiences and desires will separate them into different worlds until George's case brings them together later in life.

Short-listed for the 2005 Man Booker Prize, Julian Barnes' meditative and elegant novel is filled with compelling fictional portraits of Arthur Conan Doyle and George Edalji.

Like a well-crafted whodunit, the case's clues are laid out skillfully.

The novel begins with a series of alternating biographies in which we learn that George is the son of an Indian father and a Scottish mother, who, faced with the malice of his classmates, will naively deny that race has anything to do with their harassment.

He wants a useful and English life. Respecting authority and enjoying order, he becomes a solicitor and envisions himself getting married one day, even though he cannot fathom how one meets a prospective wife.

The proudest day of his life is when he publishes a law document about the British railroad, a system he admires for its precision.

He continues to sleep in the same room with his father, just as he did as a child.

Arthur, a Scot, is both enamored and disappointed by the virtue of English chivalry.

For him, King Arthur and the Knights of the Round Table are an ideal, though it pains him that the age of chivalry has ended.

He likes to perform, taking on different voices and the whimsy of being someone else, and publishes short stories. Like all things, literary fame comes to him without much struggle.

Arthur is knighted, and his fictional character's fame will eventually rival his own celebrity status.

Knowing that an errant knight is an oxymoron, he vows fidelity to his ill wife while engaging in a serious but chaste affair.

Barnes expertly examines these two men, shaving down the spectacle of their lives until he reveals the very core of their being.

George is awkward, bewildered and confused as he is betrayed by the authority he respects because of its very essence -- its very Englishness.

Arthur also believes in the fairness of his society and operates with the pure conviction that his involvement in the affair will win George a pardon and save him from further disgrace.

In much the same manner that Emile Zola's "J'accuse" publicized the anti-Semitism behind the Dreyfus affair when a French soldier was accused of spying for the Germans and sentenced to life imprisonment on Devil's Island, Arthur's determined intervention in George's case will reveal a racist and lazy police force.

Like his fictional hero Sherlock Holmes, Doyle combs through the case, re-interviewing witnesses, finding new clues, and new information, finally giving George a defense.

Unlike what happened in France, where the Dreyfus affair caused scandal and reform in the French government, the outcome in this case was typically British and therefore subdued.

Though pardoned, George is never officially pronounced innocent nor does he receive government compensation for its miscarriage of justice.

However, thanks to Arthur's involvement, the British established a court of appeals.

"England was a quieter place, just as principled, but less keen on making a fuss about its principles; a place where people got on with their own business and did not seek to interfere with that of others; where great public eruptions took place from time to time, eruptions of feeling which might even tip over into violence and injustice, but which soon faded in the memory, and were rarely built into the history of the country."

This is a beguiling and moving novel. Employing rich historical detail, Barnes masters the gravity of loss and longing that each man experiences. His portraits paint a real sense of lives lived.

Barnes succeeds in re-creating a compelling early 20th-century dilemma but rather than focusing on the crime or the mishandling of justice, he moves into the minds of these men -- one famous, the other obscure -- both threatened by a prejudiced authority.

The country's attitude to the false conviction revealed a society that had no core dedication to truth, which unfortunately sounds all too familiar today.