The Dream of Scipio by Iain Pears (2003) ( )

"The Dream of Scipio" recounts three major crises in Western culture. This is a novel of ideas, and not of fully-realized characters with a unifying plot.

This book deals with how a Roman nobleman in Gaul plans to deal with the threat of Euric the Visigoth in 475 AD. The second crisis occurs during the Avignon papacy in the fourteenth century, and the third major threat afflicts France and Europe during World War II. The principal premise here is the often-forgotten value of beliefs from the East and Asia. The Christian Church too often compels its adherents to act as nothing more than benighted, superstitious fools. ( )

Fiction, Historical fiction, Three men, in three different eras, Manlius Hippomanes in 5th century Gaul, Olivier de Noyen in 14th century Provence, and Julien Barneuve in 20th century Provence, First published, under the title: 'The dream of Scipio', by Jonathan Cape, London, 2002, First published in the USA by Riverhead Books, June 2002, 608 pp., First Italian edition, Milano, Longanesi, 2003, translated by Donatella Cerutti Pini, 471 pp., L'idea di fondo è buona, qualche pagina è stimolante, ma nel suo insieme il libro è veramente noioso, a volte sembra risvegliare l'interesse del lettore, ma subito dopo ricade in una sconcertante banalità. Arrivati verso la metà, ci si chiede il senso di questa lettura, si sfoglia il resto e si capisce subito che le pagine successive offriranno l'identica delusione delle pagine precedenti. ( )

Intriguing story in three different time periods that slowly comes together in the end--involves ideas of civilizaton, Neoplatonism, and anti-Semitism. Very good. ( )

There are solemn caveats within these review pages that The Dream of Scipio is substantively different to Pears' extraordinary preceding novel, An Instance of the Fingerpost. Well, I'm not so sure a "compare" isn't a more useful exercise than a "contrast".
Scipio is executed differently, no doubt about it: Where Fingerpost was told, in four instalments, from the perspective of the protagonists, Scipio is narrated in a rather dislocated third person past tense. Pears can't hide his own prose behind the personality of his characters this time, and while it is crisply written, the dialogue is - and its subjects are - remarkably sterile. For example, Pears would have us believe that, having been informed his lover has been carted off to a Nazi concentration camp, a character would complain about it by drawing analogies to Ancient Rome. Now this might fit the intellectual scheme of the novel, but it reads like a dog.

In Scipio, instead of four very different accounts of the same sequence of events, we have one account of three very different sequences of events - or do we? The parallels between the three sagas in Scipio are extraordinary, as if exactly the same scenario were playing out each time, History were repeating itself, only through the eyes of a different observer. This is really no more than a slight variation on the programme Pears adopted for Fingerpost.

For all that, and despite being a good deal shorter, Scipio is by far the harder book to get through. Especially compared to their living, breathing, stinking counterparts in the Fingerpost, the characters of Scipio are off-puttingly one-dimensional. Barneuve in particular has no flesh to him at all.

You get the sense here, far more than in Fingerpost, that this is the work of a doddery old academic written to please no-one but himself. I guess that's the licence granted by the extraordinary success of An Instance of the Fingerpost. The Dream of Scipio is erudite for the sake of being erudite, and at the expense of being entertaining.

The Dream of Scipio is certainly a very clever, learned book and, at the death, extremely absorbing, but it burns too coldly in getting there to match the success of An Instance of the Fingerpost. ( )