Amazon.com (ISBN 0385497695, Paperback)

In A.D. 3700, London's greatest orator, Plato, regularly delivers bravura public lectures on the long and tumultuous history of what is now a peaceful, tranquil city, secure in the certainty of its own relationship to the past. Particularly fascinated with the dark and confused epoch known as the Age of Mouldwarp, stretching from A.D. 1500 to A.D. 2300, Plato discourses on its extraordinary figures and customs from what evidence remains. These include orations on the clown Sigmund Freud and his comic masterpiece, Jokes and their Relation to the Unconscious; the African singer George Eliot, apparently author of The Waste Land; and Charles Dickens's greatest novel, The Origin of Species. And then there's E.A. Poe--or rather, Poet:

The eminence and status of the author are not in doubt. The name, for example, was not difficult to interpret. Poe is an abbreviation of Poet, and by common consent the rest was deciphered: E. A. Poe = Eminent American Poet. It seems clear enough that the writers of America enjoyed a blessed anonymity, even in the Age of Mouldwarp. The word 'poet' is known to all of us, but as there are no chants or hymns in 'Tales and Histories' we believe the term was applied indiscriminately to all writers of that civilisation.

Plato also elaborates on the era's strange rites and rituals, including "the cult of webs and nets" that apparently covered and enslaved the population. But then in the midst of these brilliant, precise public performances, he begins a dialogue with his soul. Doubt begins to creep in (Is the past really past? And are the rituals of the present so superior?), leading him on a fateful journey.

The Plato Papers is an extraordinary novel. As with the best of Peter Ackroyd's fiction, it treads a thin line between fantasy and biography, the genre he so elegantly mastered in his now classic studies Dickens, T.S. Eliot, and The Life of Thomas More. Wise and salutary, it is a wonderfully observed satire of misprision and the arrogance of philosophical certainty. --Jerry Brotton

Amazon.com Book Description (ISBN 0099289954, Paperback)

On ritual occasions, Plato, the orator, summons the citizens of London to impart the ancient history of their city, dwelling particularly on the unhappy era of Mouldwarp (AD 1500-2300). He lectures upon The Origin of Species by the nineteenth-century novelist Charles Dickens and on Sigmund Freud while providing a glossary of twentieth-century terms, and explaining such early myths of creation as "super-string theory'"and "relativity." But then he has a dream, or vision, or he goes on a real journey - opinions are divided - and enters a vast underground cavern, where citizens of Mouldwarp London still live. On his return, Plato shares his stories of this lost world, but his words spread consternation among his fellow citizens and they quickly put him on trial for corrupting the youth with his lies and fables.

Amazon.com Product Description (ISBN 0385497687, Hardcover)

"Ackroyd has written what we always knew that he alone could produce: a timeless literary masterpiece....This is a marvelous fable for our times. It is funny, wise, and strange...In the 18th century, Dean Swift cast a scorching searchlight on his own times by isolating their follies in imagined lands to which Gulliver made his imaginary travels. Ackroyd has pulled off a similar feat of travel in time and imagination."
--A.N. Wilson, Daily Mail

At the turn of the thirty-eighth century, London's greatest orator, Plato, regularly delivers bravura public lectures on the long, tumultuous history of what is now a tranquil city. Plato focuses particularly on the obscured and confusing era that began in A.D. 1500, which he calls the Age of Mouldwarp. Basing his work on an incomplete archaeological record, Plato pieces scraps of evidence together into a semicoherent whole. He lectures on the clown Sigmund Freud's comic masterpiece, Jokes and Their Relation to the Unconscious, and on the prolific author Charles D.'s greatest novel, The Origin of Species. And he explores the confusing rituals of Mouldwarp, including the cult of webs and nets that covered and enslaved the population.

In approximately A.D. 2300, when the sun went out and the planet fell into a thousand years of darkness, the Age of Mouldwarp came to a close, and the dark Age of Witspell began. But this epoch holds little interest for Plato, and in the midst of his public performances he begins a dialogue with his soul that leads him closer to the citizens of Mouldwarp than any strict historical inquiry might allow.

As with the best of Ackroyd's fiction, The Plato Papers treads a thin line between fantasy and biography, the genre of which Ackroyd is a heralded master. It is at once remarkably funny and erudite, a brilliant and entertaining portrayal of the ways in which the future is imagined, the present absorbed, and the past misrepresented. The Plato Papers is a tour de force of wisdom and wit that enlists all of Ackroyd's most wonderful skills and talents in a true masterpiece, brimming with delights and insights.


THE PLATO PAPERS, as with the best of Ackroyd's fiction, treads a thin line between fantasy and biography, the genre of which Ackroyd is a heralded master. It is at once remarkably funny and erudite, a wise and entertaining portrayal of the ways in which the past is misrepresented. Perfectly timed for the year 2000 as we imagine millennia beyond our own, "this masterpiece of contemporary writing will entertain readers for years to come" (Jay Parini, author of The Last Station). -->