book #11

[realthog]

I bought my copy of Iain Pears's huge 1998 novel An Instance of the Fingerpost some years ago via amazon.com and the reason I've only now gotten around to reading it is because it was one of those Amazon Marketplace used-book purchases where the seller's description, although technically entirely accurate so I had no legalistic grounds for complaint, gave a misleading impression of the quality of the item. I should really just have put this copy into the next library/charity sale and bought myself another, but . . . well, I'm Scottish, and . . .

Anyway, conquering my aesthetic qualms over the tactile sensation of the reglued spine and the slightly icky state of the jacket (such a shame, when Riverhead had clearly put a lot of effort into the production) and overcoming a gross lassitude derived from the latest and vilest of the succession of bouts I've been having with flu this year, the other day I got stuck in. Now, of course, I wish I hadn't waited so long . . . and I'm certainly in the market for a nicer copy, because this is a book that should and will be a permanent fixture in my library.

Set in Oxford in 1663, in the immediate aftermath of the demise of Cromwell's Commonwealth and the Restoration of the Monarchy, it comprises four narratives, each attaining the length of a shortish novel, relating to the death by poisoning of an abrasive Oxford don and the trial, execution and subsequent dissection of a local woman for the crime. Well, that's what we might think the narratives are about, but really they're about an altogether different mystery, at the heart of which lies an action that, in context of its era, could be described as an altogether different crime. And yet even that may not be the most important crime in the book, because . . .

This might sound as if Pears's text is in some way muddled, but it very much is not. I was reminded on many occasions while wallowing happily in this large and glorious novel not so much of Umberto Eco's The Name of the Rose, which is the customary comparison people make (including the publisher), as of those two wonderful early smoke-and-mirrors novels by John Fowles, The Magus and The French Lieutenant's Woman. Pears's four narrators give four equally plausible but radically at-odds accounts of the central events, their interpretations varying not just because they themselves were involved in different sets of the incidents but also because of the distorting lenses of their own bigotries, ulterior motives and/or preconceptions. We are reassured that the last of the four -- the "instance of the fingerpost" (a slight adaptation of a phrase of Francis Bacon's) -- represents the truth, but it in itself contains elements that must make us wonder if perhaps there is yet a further level of truth that could be revealed in a fifth narrative, the narrative that is so poignantly not available to us: that of Sarah, the young woman convicted of a crime she did not commit.

What Pears succeeds also in doing is to throw us into the deep end of an age that's quite alien to ours. Justice is a lottery, with the innocent as likely to be punished as the guilty, while "gentlemen" can generally do as they please; everyone knows this, everyone's perfectly happy about it -- an innocent swings as well as a criminal, after all, and thus serves every bit as satisfyingly as a visible sign of "justice being done". Brutality is a commonplace, by the high-born upon the low-born, by males upon females; more often than not it is justified as being the Lord's will. Catholics are loathed and despised -- in fact, they're on occasion regarded, in a fine piece of chicken-and-eggery, as heretics. Science is only just beginning to shake off the debilitating burden of religious superstition: even the big scientific breakthrough described in the novel, the development of the technique of blood transfusion by Richard Lower, comes about as much through balderdash about an elan vital present in the blood as for any rational considerations. And so on. With the caveat that I'm no historian, it's my feeling that Pears's portrayal of the period is pretty accurate. Hm. Pretty depressingly accurate, truth be told: we haven't left all of these things behind.

Most of the book's central characters, including the poisoned don, Robert Grove, are genuine historical characters; others, while fictitious, are based on real personages. All, genuine or invented, have the same feel of reality about them; illogically, I found myself quite disappointed to discover from the handy dramatis personae at the back that a couple of my favourite characters were merely inventions!

A book I'll remember for a long time. Now off to glug a bit more DayQuil.