AN Instance of the Fingerpost: A Novel
by Iain Pears
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Book Summary Information
Author: Iain PearsEdition: Paperback
Audio: English (Unknown); English (Original Language); English (Published)
Published: 2000-04-01
ISBN: 1573227951
Number of pages: 704
Publisher: Riverhead Trade
Book Reviews of AN Instance of the Fingerpost: A Novel
Book Review: An intricate masterpiece - light falling on darkness, shadows from the light
Summary: 5 Stars
Iain Pears sprang to my list of "must-read" authors with this novel. It's not that his art-history mysteries weren't delicious - they were. I enjoyed them thoroughly. But this book is something else: it is a literary work of art.
You'll have read about comparisons with Eco's superb "Name of the Rose", and it's true there are similarities. Perhaps the most striking similarity is that both authors love words, and the very meaning of "meaning". Iain Pears has focused upon truth, and how every human being has an entirely unique perspective, both in what constitutes truth and in what constitutes honour.
I do note that the reviews here have missed what is perhaps Mr Pear's finest achievement - in that the resolution to this novel is not a final and all-revealing one. The structure of this novel is that of four narrative strands, roughly covering the same events, although with differences in connected events due to personal priorities and personal points of view. Each of the narrators seems to reveal a little more of the truth, or to reveal some aspect of the truth, the sense being that with the final narrative, all is revealed.
But this is not what is happening. Iain Pears has created an extraordinary effect here, of ever-increasing information but also ever-increasing wideness in what is, in what may be, in what reality consists of. This is truly inevitable. After all, remember that the writers are separate individuals writing "their" truth, "their" reality, and this means that the pay-off, the final revelation, is not of a final truth, but only of a final view of the final narrator. Is he telling the truth in every respect? Of course not. Everyone has lied or kept back the truth or convinced himself of his own viewpoint... and the final narrator is no more exempt from this than his predecessors.
We learn more about Sarah Blundy through the four different views, and about the truth of how the murder occurred; about the dreadful miscarriage of justice; the fragility of the human heart; the degree to which we can misunderstand each other; the solemnity of human love and the degradation of human hatred; the terrible power wielded by men who are not fit to wield it. Each of the narrators also shows, with pitiless clarity, what sort of man he is himself.
If there is a final truth, it is that human beings can fool themselves so thoroughly that perception, the tool, is confused for reality, the result.
Iain Pears' writing is superb. His understanding of the complex weaving of individuals with each other, and the motivations that drive them, is magnificent. There is a sombre magnificent in this novel - it breathed richness and suffering, futility and triumph from the author into its pages.
While it is not a short book by any means, it does not seem too long for its substance. The language is not remarkably complex, just beautifully used with care for balance and colour.
Highly recommended.
Summary of AN Instance of the Fingerpost: A Novel
"It is 1663, and England is wracked with intrigue and civil strife. When an Oxford don is murdered, it seems at first that the incident can have nothing to do with great matters of church and state....Yet, little is as it seems in this gripping novel, which dramatizes the ways in which witnesses can see the same events yet remember them falsely. Each of four narrators--a Venetian medical student, a young man intent on proving his late father innocent of treason, a cryptographer, and an archivist--fingers a different culprit...an erudite and entertaining tour de force." --People
An Instance of the Fingerpost is that rarest of all possible literary beasts--a mystery powered as much by ideas as by suspects, autopsies, and smoking guns. Hefty, intricately plotted, and intellectually ambitious, Fingerpost has drawn the inevitable comparisons to Umberto Eco's The Name of the Rose and, for once, the comparison is apt.
The year is 1663, and the setting is Oxford, England, during the height of Restoration political intrigue. When Dr. Robert Grove is found dead in his Oxford room, hands clenched and face frozen in a rictus of pain, all the signs point to poison. Rashomon-like, the narrative circles around Grove's murder as four different characters give their version of events: Marco da Cola, a visiting Italian physician--or so he would like the reader to believe; Jack Prestcott, the son of a traitor who fled the country to avoid execution; Dr. John Wallis, a mathematician and cryptographer with a predilection for conspiracy theories; and Anthony Wood, a mild-mannered Oxford antiquarian whose tale proves to be the book's "instance of the fingerpost." (The quote comes from the philosopher Bacon, who, while asserting that all evidence is ultimately fallible, allows for "one instance of a fingerpost that points in one direction only, and allows of no other possibility.")
Like The Name of the Rose, this is one whodunit in which the principal mystery is the nature of truth itself. Along the way, Pears displays a keen eye for period details as diverse as the early days of medicine, the convoluted politics of the English Civil War, and the newfangled fashion for wigs. Yet Pears never loses sight of his characters, who manage to be both utterly authentic denizens of the 17th century and utterly authentic human beings. As a mystery, An Instance of the Fingerpost is entertainment of the most intelligent sort; as a novel of ideas, it proves equally satisfying.
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