The Dream of Scipio by Iain Pears
Reviews In the 400s, as the Roman Empire settles into dust, landowner-turned-bishop Manlius attempts to record the ideas of his teacher, the Neo-Platonist Sophia. In the 1300s, this treatise (The Dream of Scipio) is discovered by poet Olivier de Noyen, whose efforts to understand it lead him to a learned Jew and a secret love that forces upon him a momentous moral decision while the plague ravages the countryside. In the 1930s, Julien Barneuve encounters de Noyen and his references to the wondrous treatise, even as the Holocaust looms and Barneuve struggles desperately to protect the woman he loves a painter and a Jew. The writing here is not as felicitous as in Pears's magisterial An Instance of the Fingerpost, but the plotting is a marvel; the text moves smoothly among the three eras, drawing parallels that rarely seem forced. In the end, Pears asks good, cutting questions about the idea of civilization, showing that those who claim to preserve it are often its worst enemies. Most libraries will want this. [Previewed in Prepub Alert, LJ 2/15/02.] Barbara Hoffert, Library Journal Copyright 2002 Cahners Business Information. Critic Harold Bloom once opined that literature is a series of misprisions, or misreadings, by writers of their predecessors. Although Pears might not have had Bloom in mind in his latest novel, the premise is an unlikely embodiment of Bloom's thesis. The story unfolds in three time frames, in each of which a man and a woman are in love, civilization itself is crumbling and Jews become the scapegoats for larger cultural anxieties. In the first scenario, Manlius is a wealthy Roman living in Provence in the empire's crepuscular 5th century. Although he has received the last echo of Hellenic wisdom, he is surrounded by believers in a nasty sect he despises Christianity but must find some means to protect Provence from the barbarians. In fighting for civilization, he becomes a bishop and the promoter, almost accidentally, of one of the West's first pogroms. In the next narrative time period, a manuscript of Manlius's poem, The Dream of Scipio, a neo-Platonic allegory, is discovered by Olivier de Noyen, a Provenal poet of the 14th century. As his 20th-century interpreter, Julien Barneuve, discovers in investigating his violent death, de Noyen was attacked because he got caught up in a political intrigue in Avignon while trying to save his love, Rebecca, from a pogrom unleashed by the Black Death. Barneuve, Pears's third protagonist, has a Jewish lover, too, but is enmeshed in the racist policies of Vichy France. Pears has a nice sense of what it means to live in a time when things fall apart, and not only the center but even the peripheries will not hold. But the readers who flocked to An Instance of the Fingerpost might not find the pages turning so fast in this less mystery-driven outing. Rights sold in Canada, France, Germany, Holland, Italy, Sweden, and the U.K. (June 10) Forecast: Though it won't be such an easy sell as his mysteries, Pears's latest (with a first printing of 75,000 and $150,000 ad/promo) should attract critical attention for its complex treatment of provocative historical and moral themes. Copyright 2002 Cahners Business Information.
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Binding: Paperback
Published by: Jonathan Cape Ltd: , 2002
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ISBN: 9780224061889 | 0224061887
400 pages.
Book Condition: Good
Cover worn. Text tanned
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