An Instance of the Fingerpost

I just finished a very interesting book, An Instance of the Fingerpost by Iain Pears. I learned about the book from an old acquaintance's Facebook list of his five favorite books, which I would say shows that such exercises do sometimes have uses. Looking it up, I discovered that Iain Pears is also the author of a series of mysteries involving an art dealer, which I tried once and despised. But I found descriptions of Fingerpost so intriguing that I ordered a copy anyway. My take on Pears now is that having written Fingerpost, which must have involved a gigantic effort of research and writing, and become a noted author with a reputation he could cash in on, he decided to write some books that involved no effort at all. Hence the very thin mysteries, which I advise you to avoid.

An Instance of the Fingerpost is set in 17th-century England, and it is narrated by four 17th-century people, two of whom are real historical persons. The four narrators all describe the events surrounding the death of an Oxford fellow named Robert Grove. Each has his own ideas about what happened and why. At least three of them are wrong. One is an Italian visitor, who goes first I suppose so he could describe things about 17th-century England that no native would ever remark on. The narrators all have distinctive personalities, which are quite believable as the personalities of 17th-century people. This is very impressive but also sometimes tedious, since all these men are strongly sexist, if not downright misogynist, all look down on the lower classes, and all strike a 21st-century reader as religious fanatics. Two of them are also such jerks that sometimes I had trouble slogging through their stories. The Italian visitor is interested in medical research, and 17th-century medical research is not for the faint of heart. But their stories intersect in a marvelous and believable way. Each sees the things you imagine he would see and draws the conclusions you imagine he would draw. It must have taken an enormous amount of planning and diagramming to lay out the details of who saw what, when, leading each to his own ideas about Grove's death, and making each narrator's conclusions plausible to a reader who already knows the conclusions of others.

If a very long mystery set in 17th-century Oxford and London, involving religion, politics, and science, told from multiple points of view, sounds interesting to you, by all means find a copy of An Instance of the Fingerpost, because it is really a marvelous book.