Written by Iain Pears. Riverhead Books, 694 pages.
Newspaper clipping submitted by Cara Carlsdottir
If you liked Umberto Eco's "Name of the Rose," you should run to buy Iain Pears' lavishly erudite historical mystery "An Instance of the Fingerpost."
Like Eco's story of nefarious doings at a 14th-century Italian monastery, Pears' novel is a compendious historical pageant set among 17th-century clergymen, scholars and politicians concerned with the natural and the supernatural in roughly equal measure.
A murder is at the center of the story, or, more accurately, the several stories of Pears' massive but unflagging book. "An Instance of the Fingerpost" is told "Rashomon" style, by four different narrators, each of whom has only a partial understanding of events and only one of whom makes telling the truth his primary purpose.
Four rather long excursions into the same basic tale could grow wearisome, but Pears' effort never does. The author, a British journalist and the author of six previous detective stories, brilliantly exploits the stormy, conspiracy-heavy history of England after the death of Oliver Cromwell to fashion a believable portrait of 17th-century political and intellectual life as well as a whodunit of almost mesmerizing complexity.
Most of Pears' dozen or so main characters are imagined versions of historical figures. These range from the obese and greedy Earl of Clarendon, prime minister to the restored monarch, Charles II, to the Oxford apothecary who was landlord to the chemist Robert Boyle.
Pears then throws in a few entirely fictitious people. But whether entirely or only partly imagined, all of the members of this unruly cast are finely individualized, craggily differentiated characters, almost biblical in their moral and intellectual variety.
The story begins with one Marco de Cola, self-described "gentleman of Venice," who is writing an account of a visit he made to England for the purpose, he says, of recovering property stolen from his father's merchant trading network. Cola is a kind of dilettante physician who soon finds himself in Oxford keeping company with the likes of Boyle, the father of modern chemistry, and Richard Lower, a pioneering doctor who made early experiments in blood transfusion.
"Why do we breathe?" Cola asks, suggesting Pears' knack for the discursive tone of the time and place of his story. "We assume that it is to regulate the body heat, to draw in cool air and thus moderate the blood. Again, is that true? Although the tendency to breathe more often when we exercise indicates this, the converse is not true, for I placed a rat in a bucket of ice and stopped its nose, but it died nonetheless."
Cola is the first to describe the novel's main event, the death, apparently by poisoning, of an Oxford theologian who had plenty of enemies. He also introduces the readers to the other significant characters.
The principal element that eventually binds all these figures together is a political intrigue of confounding subterfuge and double-dealing. Indeed, a warning is in order: Never assume that anything said in this book, however factual it may appear at the time, will not be demonstrated to be false.
When the denouement comes, it is with a new and final twist, one whose quality of surprise is the final proof of this talented author's almost infinite capacity to replace one understanding of things with another.
