What Book to Read?

I picked up this book not knowing anything about the work of Iain Pears, but it seems he is well known as a writer of historical mysteries, as well a series about an art historian/detective which draws on his own professional background. This one, published in 2009, is about the life of a fictional nineteenth century arms manufacturer who has some things in common with the real life armaments king Basil Zaharoff, and which deals with some real events, in particular the financial ‘panic’ of 1890.

The story is told by three narrators in three parts set in 1909, 1890 and 1869; in other words, the reader learns the story backwards. The book opens in 1953 when Matthew Braddock, a BBC reporter approaching retirement, attends the funeral of an old woman, Elizabeth Robillard, in Paris, and learns of a package of papers left to him by Henry Cort, a British intelligence agent, to be opened after her death. He then tells the story of his own involvement with Elizabeth many years before when he was hired ostensibly to write the biography of her late husband, John Stone, but in reality to search for an unknown child mentioned in his will. This is followed by the contents of the package, one set of papers outlining the involvement of Henry Cort with Elizabeth before she married Stone, the second being an account by John Stone of a period of time spent in Venice before he became a successful industrialist and armaments manufacturer.

The structure of the book makes for an intriguing story, as much is hidden from all the narrators, and while there are hints about the connections between events and people, these are not to be trusted as characters often draw what turn out to be wrong conclusions. The truth, of course, comes out in the end, and while I did eventually guess what was coming, it took me quite a while. The denouement does involve a fair degree of coincidence, but I think Pears probably just gets away with it. I did need to go back and check on some details as doing things backwards makes it even harder than usual to recognise what’s going to be important, but this wasn’t really a great problem.

I’m less sure that he gets away with having the three narrators, in the sense that I didn’t find their voices were really distinctive. At least one critic categorically disagrees with me about this – read her review here. The narratives all have a nineteenth century feel to them, but I think this is more subject matter than characterisation. Stone in particular seemed a bit wishy washy for a man who achieved all that is claimed for him.

Certainly the stories reflect in an interesting way some of the preoccupations of late nineteenth and early twentieth century society, such as the primacy of the market, the rise of industrial capitalism, great power rivalry, social Darwinism and the hereditary nature of degeneracy. There’s even a rather strange (and possibly unnecessary?) digression into the supernatural. And at the heart of the story, there is the very Victorian conceit of the beautiful, irresistible woman with a hidden past. But there are times when I think Pears goes too far with the detail. Did the early industrialists, for example, really reflect that companies ‘are designed to multiply capital’ and that everything they do is not merely justified but required by this end? Did we really need a lecture on free market economics? At 600 pages, I think Pears has sometimes been a bit self indulgent.

This is not a thriller, but neither is it a literary novel. It is a mystery in the tradition of Wilkie Collins, and perhaps bears comparison with the two nineteenth century replica novels by Michael Cox –The Meaning of Night and The Glass of Time – which I wrote about in an earlier post. This means you probably need to be interested in history, and in the slow working out of events, to enjoy this book.

You can check out some other reviews of it here.