Edalji, born in the Midlands to an Indian father and a Scottish mother, is proudly, unimaginatively English himself: a painfully straightforward kind of man, for whom the law is a far more congenial way to make sense of the world than the religion preached by his father, the vicar of Great Wyrley, Staffordshire. With the law, George thinks, "there is a great deal of textual exegesis, of explaining how words can and do mean different things; and there are almost as many books of commentary on the law as there are on the Bible. But at the end there is not that further leap to be made. At the end, you have an agreement, a decision to be obeyed, an understanding of what something means. There is a journey from confusion to clarity."

The idea that George Edalji -- dark-skinned, unathletic and unsociable, with a last name no one can pronounce -- is, at his core, more conventionally English than Sir Arthur Conan Doyle would perhaps be sufficient irony for most novelists. For Barnes, however, a tasty little paradox like that is no more than an amuse-bouche. He has much bigger fish (and chips) to fry. By the time Arthur and George finally meet, well over halfway through the book whose title they share, we know enough about both men to understand that their different styles of Englishness in some way stand for their different visions of life. (Another tiny, succulent irony: Arthur, pre-Holmes, was an ophthalmologist; George is severely myopic.) What they have in common, it turns out, is a fundamental seriousness about making the "journey from confusion to clarity," and when they meet, in 1907, they also share the (unspoken) sense that their individual journeys have been taking them in entirely the other direction.

The course of George's life has been diverted by, of all things, the British criminal justice system. He has, on mighty scanty evidence, been accused, tried and convicted of a series of livestock mutilations near Great Wyrley, has spent three years in prison and -- maybe worst from his point of view -- has lost his license to practice law. Arthur's confusion is moral and, appropriately, spiritual. His wife, Touie, has died after a long battle with consumption, leaving Doyle, now in his late 40's, with a very uncomfortable, even paralyzing, load of guilt. He has been in love with another woman, Jean Leckie, for several years, and although he is now free to marry his "mystical wife" (with whom, in order not to feel an utter cad, he has not slept) he finds himself depressed, incapable of getting on with it in his usual vigorous manner. "He always imagined that Touie's long illness would somehow prepare him for her death," Barnes writes. "He always imagined that grief and guilt, if they followed, would be more clear-edged, more defined, more finite. Instead they seem like weather, like clouds constantly re-forming into new shapes, blown by nameless, unidentifiable winds." As much as Doyle hates this changeable climate, its unpredictability is not, in the event, completely bad for him: one day a stray gust blows him a chance at salvation, in the form of a letter from George Edalji.

For Arthur, the opportunity to leap into action, play detective and redress a grievous wrong is just the ticket. It offers a way to restore him to his best self and perhaps even to recover his long-held faith that "life was a chivalric quest," which in his recent funk has taken a bit of a beating. He doesn't quite cry out "The game's afoot!" but damn near. To George, whose preferred model for earthly existence is a railway journey -- a dependable, uneventful, on-schedule progression from a starting point to a designated terminus -- the matter is simpler. He wants his life put back on track.

The story of Arthur Conan Doyle and George Edalji is true, fairly well known and semi-important historically -- Doyle's work on the case helped lead to the creation of a Court of Criminal Appeal in 1907 -- and Barnes tells it briskly, carefully and vividly, with the sort of pace and variety that readers of popular fiction demand and connoisseurs of literary fiction learn to persuade themselves they can do without. "He is quite clear," this novelist writes of his novelist hero, "about thewriter's responsibilities: they are firstly, to be intelligible, secondly, to be interesting, and thirdly, to be clever." While Barnes evidently agrees, and happily fulfills his obligation to deliver a cracking good yarn, he is maybe not quite so clear as Sir Arthur on this point -- less certain that's all there is to the tricky business of writing fiction. "Arthur and George" isn't interesting merely for its intelligible and clever story. As in every first-rate novel, its essence, its best self, is felt as a kind of spectral presence, less defined and less finite than the stories we tell ourselves, as we commonly and pragmatically do, for the purpose of aiding us to somehow, anyhow, get on with our lives -- to imagine the clear light at the end of the tunnel, the ending that makes sense of the beginning (and, if we're lucky, of all the confusion in between).