Recent Reads

The Dream of Scipio, by Iain Pears

I picked this up only because I saw it at a dollar store where I was casually browsing while waiting for some freinds to show up for dinner at a restaurant next door. I'm glad I did. It's easily the best novel I've read in months.

Three different men, in three different intertwining plots in three different historical epochs, deal with the problems of love, politics, and the kinds of social chaos that make for interesting history, but make shredded ruin out of the lives of those human beings unfortunate enough to exist during them. In the waning days of the Roman Empire, a provincial aristocrat in southern Gaul faces the collapse of civilization, the apparent failure of philosophy, and an irresistible influx of barbarian warlords. A thousand years later, a gifted young poet becomes entangled in the snares of art, politics and the dreaded Black Plague at the court of Pope Clement in Avignon. In the framing story, a twentieth-century French scholar tries to puzzle out their two lives and the intellectual connections between them while around him, his country succumbs to the influence of the Hitler's Germany.

Pears is reportedly the author of a number of detective novels, and some of the intellectual gamesmanship of the whodunit is evident here. The story begins with a brusque account of a suicide, and only then proceeds to tell the story that led up to that act. Pears is a master at dropping tantalizing hints to the reader as he switches back and forth between characters and timelines, and masterfully intertwines the action of the plot with reminders of the erratic course of history and the philosophical implications of the characters' lives and fates. Does the Dream of Scipio -- a philosophical view of society described by one of the characters in the novel -- justify the ways of man? Can it ever?

A book well worth recommending to any fan of historical mysteries or philosophical fiction. Da Vinci Code readers who don't insist on single-sentence paragraphs and four-page chapters that all end with physical cliffhanger situations might enjoy it, too.

The Portrait, by Iain Pears

I picked this up out of curiousity after reading the Dream of Scipio. The title and cover -- featuring an illustration of a unusual painted portrait-- seem designed to attract Da Vinci Code readers. I read it anyway.

When I started reading it, I felt something like a shock of recognition. The book is very reminiscent in its structure of Walker Percy's Lancelot, a book which had a great influence on me when I read it nearly ten years ago. A narrator, who may or may not be reliable, speaks in extended first-person monologues to an old freind regarding past and present events, the nature and explanation of which may be subject to dispute. And Pears, like a good detective novelist, keeps the reader guessing about his character's ultimate goal may be. (There's just a subtle hint of Poe's Fortunato....)

The Portrait doesn't have the philosophical ambition or weight of Lancelot, but it's a good read in its own right. The narrator's eccentric, perhaps slightly-unhinged persona keep the reader guessing about what he's up to, and his rambling, opinionated discourses about the past events that brought him and his listener together are an entertaining puzzle to unravel.

Ubermensch!, by Kim Newman

What if a small capsule bearing the infant sole survivor of the planet Krypton to Earth had landed near Kleinburg, Germany, instead of Smallville, USA?

Thanks to the poster on the Fiction Magazines listserv who suggested this short story. I'm not sure I agree with the author's implied stance on nature-versus-nurture, though.

On the other hand, though, Frederik Pohl's The Gold at the Starbow's End (1973 World's Best SF, ed. Donald Wollheim), also mentioned on the same listserv, was something of a disappointment. The premise is interesting, but the conclusion is far too redolent of dippy early-70s nostrums about the purported mystical powers of the human mind. I might have found it convincing if the characters were given something more to work with than, well, nihilo.

Poul Anderson's Goat Song, from the same volume, develops some amusing parallels, but ultimately works better as an exercise in literary gamesmanship than an emotionally or intellectually compelling story in its own right. I seem to recall that Anderson wrote an introduction to Silverlock, and it would seem that this story was influenced by the tale of Mr. A. Clarence Shandon and his bardic guide. There are even smidgens of archaic poetry scattered through it. Unfortunately, the story is chained far too closely to its mythic predecessor, and lacks much of the casual irony and emotional vibrancy of Silverlock's clueless narrator. As a result, the story is all too predictable to the readers who recognize it, and probably incomprehensible to those who do not. Anderson's reputation quite rightfully rests on The Broken Sword, The High Crusade, A Midsummer Night's Tempest, and dozens of other works superior to this one, which is at best an hour's mild amusement for a certain type of educated reader.