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Lost in France The Dream of Scipio Iain Pears Jonathan Cape? 17. 99, pp 392 Golden age crime writers, like bigamists, enjoyed the freedom granted by a double identity. Oxford don J. I. M.
Stewart published racy thrillers as Michael Innes; poet C. Day Lewis masqueraded as Nicholas Blake; and Edmund Crispin was in fact the composer Bruce Montgomery. Iain Pears, like Stewart, is a respected academic, the author of a monograph on eighteenth-century collectors, but hes not too proud to publish crime novels under his own name. His Italian art-world romps have titles like The Bernini Bust and The Raphael Affair: theyre light and ingenious and they sell well; and their success has encouraged him to move ever further into the mainstream. The bestselling An Instance of the Fingerpost (1997) marked a new departure for Pears; far more structurally and stylistically ambitious than the Italian series, it suggested that he was developing his voice as a serious novelist, as did his move from HarperCollins to Cape. But, on the evidence of the new novel, it looks as if An Instance of the Fingerpost may have been a one-off.
The action what there is of it in The Dream of Scipio moves between 5 th-, 14 th- and 20 th-century Avignon. Our scholar-hero is Julien Barneuve, a 1930 s French intellectual whose failure to intervene decisively in public life leads him into the service of the Vichy regime. Before the war, he had unearthed an obscure Proven 231; al poet of the fourteenth century, Olivier de Non, and a philosophical manuscript, The Dream of Scipio, written by a fifth-century Roman aristocrat, Manlius Hippomanes. This mysterious text links the three men, as does their love for a woman Sophia, Rebecca, Julia a kind of Universal Muse who wafts inspiring through time. No single story provides the frame for the others, and we jump between historical moments every other paragraph. Theres a lot of movement, but very little progression.
The breathless thrills of An Instance of the Fingerpost have been exchanged for a lengthy meditation on cultural history, with characters as pegs for thoughts. The plot has more in common with an academic treatise than with a thriller. In fact, there are more exciting PhD theses. 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 factionalised form of scholarship. Olivier is purportedly a great poet, but the only fragments of his verse we encounter are (in the wholly inadequate 1865 translation of Fr 233; d 233; ric Mistral) My eyes have stabbed my soul This is more than inadequate, it is an appalling cop-out. Manliuss classical wit is marked with a similar ellipsis: They swapped aphorisms about water, played with quotations from Pliny about his garden What aphorisms?
Which quotations? And Julien's great intellect is evident only in his knowing silences. Its a commonplace (at least in academia) that literary history is a kind of detective work, but only an academic as brilliant as Nabokov could possibly construct a compelling novel around a dreadful poet. And he did that (in Pale Fire) by embedding a powerful mystery at the heart of the narrative. Pears seems to think that literary fiction is simply crime-writing without the plot.
This ambitious novel is so busy chasing its tail that it forgets to go forwards.
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