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Access-restricted-item true Addeddate 2009-08-11 01:54:19 Boxid IA100706 Boxid_2 CH107201 Camera Canon 5D City New York Donor The four parts of the novel each have a different narrator, presenting their account of events -- and then also as successive reactions to the previous accounts. Cola's rather straightforward account, by an outsider briefly among a community and in a nation in considerable turmoil which he would seem to have nothing to do with and little more than visiting interest in (beyond that rather hopeless-sounding business situation in London, which indeed he can do little about) seems, on its plain face, to be trustworthy enough. An Instance of the Fingerpost is a literary mystery in the tradition of Eco’s The Name of the Rose, making use of historical figures and events to frame its fictional story. Like Eco’s acclaimed novel, the book uses the form of the murder mystery to approach larger issues. The mystery of Robert Grove’s death provides Iain Pears with a device for exploring the events surrounding the return of the monarchy to power following the fall of Oliver Cromwell’s Protectorate and the byzantine structure of political life during the Restoration. The story’s skillful intermingling of fictional and historical characters and events gives the book a striking verisimilitude, even as its use of multiple narrators examines the subjective nature of personal histories and the difficulty in ascertaining an objective historical truth. Pears’s vivid re-creation of the complex world of England under Charles II shows painstaking research into not only the physical details of seventeenth century life but its ideas and attitudes as well. The Restoration was a period of upheaval both politically and scientifically, and Pears’s choice of widely differing narrators allows him to present a broad spectrum of subjects and experiences. In so doing, he captures the inherent drama of a period in which extraordinary changes were altering the lives of ordinary people caught up in the sweep of history.
As it turns out, quite a few parties have things to hide and reasons to allow events to unfold (and opinions to be formed) as they do. The first part is narrated by a Venetian who introduces himself as Marco da Cola, who recounts coming to England in 1663 at the behest of his father, to look into a business partnership the family had in London which seems to have gone bad. A large part of the novel is developed from the author's use of historical events. Consider the historical events and the fictional plot both as separate entities and then as a whole. Does the historical intrigue add to the strength of the novel? The moral component of Bacon's admonition is the heart of Pears' novel for the simple reason that a murder has been committed and a suspect is indeed to be hanged for it. As he presents his four versions of the story, Pears is has steeped himself in the reading and the attitudes of the period, so that his characters, in their lives and confessions, embody its rich contradictions, its entwining of superstition with the spirit of new learning, of religion with
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If you are interested in the times in which Calculus was invented, or if you like fairly long historical murder mysteries, then you are likely to enjoy this book. I did.
There are many beautiful passages, certainly, but the central aspects of the book would have been better treated in a study of real writers than in this oddly fictionalised form of scholarship. Iain Pears’ intricately plotted, highly intelligent and very enjoyable novel, An Instance of the Fingerpost, explores the troubling and problematic side of the historical movement labelled with the smug term ‘The Enlightenment’.
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There's no obvious reason for him to make things up, nor any real suggestion of any personal stakes beyond in seemingly minor matters such as that of getting credit for a possible scientific breakthrough. It also rapidly became clear that London was not a healthy place. I do not mean the famous plague, which had not yet afflicted the city; I mean that Manston, that very evening, sent round hired hands to demonstrate that my life would be more secure elsewhere. Fortunately, they did not kill me; indeed, I acquitted myself well in the brawl thanks to the fees my father had paid to my fencing master, and I believe at least one bravo left the field in a worse state than I. But I took the warning none the less and decided to stay out of the way until my course was clearer. I will mention little more of this matter except to say that eventually I abandoned the quest for recompense, and my father decided that the costs involved were not worth the money lost. The matter was reluctantly forgotten for two years, when we heard that one of Manston's boats had put into Trieste to sit out a storm. My family moved to have it seized - Venetian justice being as favourable to Venetians as English law is to Englishmen - and the hull and cargo provided some compensation for our losses.
Inter praerogativas instantiarum, ponemus loco decimo quarto Instantias Crucis; translato vocabulo a Crucibus, quae erectae in biviis indicant et signant viarum separationes. ... An Instance of the Fingerpost is the kind of book which has you reading it by torchlight under the bedclothes. (...) Beneath the suspense and the effortless erudition, An Instance of the Fingerpost is a novel profoundly concerned with Christian thought. (The only thing wrong with this book is its title." - Amanda Craig, The Times in importance as the book broadens out to embrace more complex material -- so much so that when at last the murderer unmasks himself, his identity is oddly unimportant. There is no astonishment, no snap-of-the-fingers satisfaction at havingDisappointingly, the accounts don't always ring entirely true -- and not in the way Pears wants them not to (which is: deceptively) -- with Pears struggling some in making his voices sound sufficiently different, and falling short with parts (like Wallis' infatuation with a servant, whose death he comes to blame Cola for). Underlying it all are competing notions of the truth, with citations from Francis Bacon, the father of the scientific revolution, providing signposts to Pears' intrigue. There is a wonderful scene in the novel’s first section where Marco da Cola attends (and loathes) a production of King Lear by William Shakespeare. King Lear tells the story of a once-powerful monarch humiliated and unraveled by his own weakness and the treachery of his children. Why, then, might Pears have chosen to include Lear in his novel in particular? Do you see any parallels between the world invoked in King Lear (which was written in 1606) and the world of Fingerpost? How might this play have particular significance in Restoration England, particularly in Oxford, which was a Royalist stronghold? (Remember that not everyone shares da Cola’s reaction; indeed, Richard Lower reacts to the play very differently.) What, then, does the each character’s reaction to the play say about their politics?
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