With one foot set in the 1960s, the novel’s central character, Henry Lytten, is an Oxford fellow with a fondness for the fantasy landscapes of local celebrities like C. S. With a nod to Philip Sidney (and Tom Stoppard), Pears unreels a series of stories that travel in several directions at once: from past to future, from future to past, and from fictive to actual and back again. They are equally “real” and equally “unreal” - take your pick. And the answer might well be: no difference at all. What’s the difference between all these systems of order, knowledge and storytelling? the attentive reader might ask. Now, almost 20 years later, Pears’s latest novel presents a complexly interwoven series of narrative entanglements that stretch across time, alternate universes and at least several textual realities - from Elizabethan pastoral romance and multiple universe theory to a Narnia-like fantasy world and Cold War international intrigue. After nearly 700 pages of deposition, when the guilty are finally sorted from the hard-to-call-innocent, many readers will understandably have already lost track of their scorecards.
His best-known novel, “An Instance of the Fingerpost,” explored a 17th-century Oxford murder and its aftermath through the memoirs of four unreliable narrators, each hotly disputing the others’ versions of reality, science, religion and justice. Nobody can tangle a text like Iain Pears.
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