The Thumbnail Book Reviews
by John Q McDonald --- 10 November 1999
by Iain Pears
It is 1663, and England's king Charles II has ascended the throne after a turbulent and violent period in the country's history, dominated by the dictator Oliver Cromwell. In Oxford, itself a site of various troubled events, things are beginning to calm down, but religious and political affinities are still extremely touchy. In the midst of all this, one man dies mysteriously in his rooms at the college. Between the gaps of historical document, Iain Pears pours a story of mystery and intrigue, as told by four different narrators, two fictional, and two historical. The victim is a historical figure, but one of whom very little seems to be really known. A young woman is tried, convicted (on her confession) and hanged for his murder. Yet, all is not as it seems. The first narrator, Marco da Cola of Venice, seems innocent and believable enough, but the subsequent narrators cast doubt on his story, as well as on those of each other's. Pears manages to involve various characters in the true historical drama of the time in a web of political and personal intrigue, all to one extent or another involving the Oxford murder. A dizzying array of historical figures appear in this book. As fascinating as that is at moments, the device of four narrators here lacks subtlety and their voices are a little too similar. By the time this reader reached the last, perhaps most reliable, narrator, he was a little less interested in the story as a whole, having heard it in detail four times. Perhaps, too, the endlessly complex intrigues that Pears presumes amongst the historical figures grows a little wearing. Though this gives the history a human cast, and illuminates the history nicely, it grew somewhat tiresome, and left this reader wondering what the real history was like. At first a compelling book, though, and refreshingly unromantic in its depiction of the period.
Also by Pears: [The Portrait]