THE MOST OFF-PUTTING THING about Iain Pears’s extraordinary 17th-century detective story An Instance of the Fingerpost (694 pages. Riverhead. $27) is, unfortunately, its title. In fact, one of the few missteps Pears makes in this erudite, funny historical novel is that he doesn’t explain–until page 594–that his title comes from a quote by Sir Francis Bacon: “”When in a Search of any Nature the Understanding stands suspended, then Instances of the Fingerpost shew the true and inviolable Way in which the Question is to be decided.” Baconian English translated: The instance in question is a category of evidence in which only one conclusion is possible. You don’t need to know that to read the book, but when you’re confused by a title, sometimes it’s easier to just not pick up the book in the first place. And that’s a fate that shouldn’t befall a mystery this good.
Pears is as learned as his title suggests (he’s got a Ph.D. in art history). But this author of six contemporary detective novels also knows how to spin a good yarn. (Likewise, his American publisher was classy enough to snap up this British best seller but savvy enough to send Pears on a meet-the-author bookstore tour six months before the book came out here.) The Oxford, England, of 1663 that he conjures for us is a place where the ferment is at least as vegetal as it is intellectual, a place of mucky streets and half-finished dormitories. Robert Boyle, John Locke and other intellectual lights of the day stroll through the narrative, but it’s Pears’s care with details–the scholars’ cheap candles rendered from fat, the boiled pig’s head they eat for dinner–that bring this gruesome Restoration tale to life Graphic Novel .
The heart of Pears’s tale is the fatal poisoning of Robert Grove, a crusty but beloved Oxford don. But very quickly the murder proves to be only one of many events in a larger web of evil that includes espionage, witchcraft, religious zealotry and rumors of regicide. Before he’s done, Pears needs four narrators to tell his thickety tale. We hear the story from a traveling Venetian, then from an aristocrat out to clear his late father’s name of charges of treason and then from a bigoted professor (who’s also a spymaster). Finally, from a mousy historian who’s been mocked by all the rest, we hear the truth.
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