In the 400s, as the Roman Empire settles into dust, landowner-turned-bishop Manlius attempts to record the ideas of his teacher, the Neo-Platonist Sophia. In the 1300s, this treatise ("The Dream of Scipio") is discovered by poet Olivier de Noyen, whose efforts to understand it lead him to a learned Jew and a secret love that forces upon him a momentous moral decision while the plague ravages the countryside. In the 1930s, Julien Barneuve encounters de Noyen and his references to the wondrous treatise, even as the Holocaust looms and Barneuve struggles desperately to protect the woman he loves a painter and a Jew. The writing here is not as felicitous as in Pears's magisterial An Instance of the Fingerpost, but the plotting is a marvel; the text moves smoothly among the three eras, drawing parallels that rarely seem forced. In the end, Pears asks good, cutting questions about the idea of civilization, showing that those who claim to preserve it are often its worst enemies. Most libraries will want this. [Previewed in Prepub Alert, LJ 2/15/02.] Barbara Hoffert, "Library Journal" (c) Copyright 2010. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.

Critic Harold Bloom once opined that literature is a series of misprisions, or misreadings, by writers of their predecessors. Although Pears might not have had Bloom in mind in his latest novel, the premise is an unlikely embodiment of Bloom's thesis. The story unfolds in three time frames, in each of which a man and a woman are in love, civilization itself is crumbling and Jews become the scapegoats for larger cultural anxieties. In the first scenario, Manlius is a wealthy Roman living in Provence in the empire's crepuscular 5th century. Although he has received the last echo of Hellenic wisdom, he is surrounded by believers in a nasty sect he despises Christianity but must find some means to protect Provence from the barbarians. In fighting for "civilization," he becomes a bishop and the promoter, almost accidentally, of one of the West's first pogroms. In the next narrative time period, a manuscript of Manlius's poem, "The Dream of Scipio," a neo-Platonic allegory, is discovered by Olivier de Noyen, a Provenal poet of the 14th century. As his 20th-century interpreter, Julien Barneuve, discovers in investigating his violent death, de Noyen was attacked because he got caught up in a political intrigue in Avignon while trying to save his love, Rebecca, from a pogrom unleashed by the Black Death. Barneuve, Pears's third protagonist, has a Jewish lover, too, but is enmeshed in the racist policies of Vichy France. Pears has a nice sense of what it means to live in a time when things fall apart, and not only the center but even the peripheries will not hold. But the readers who flocked to An Instance of the Fingerpost might not find the pages turning so fast in this less mystery-driven outing. Rights sold in Canada, France, Germany, Holland, Italy, Sweden, and the U.K. (June 10) Forecast: Though it won't be such an easy sell as his mysteries, Pears's latest (with a first printing of 75,000 and $150,000 ad/promo) should attract critical attention for its complex treatment of provocative historical and moral themes. (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved

The truism that "The evil done by men of goodwill is the worst of all" is given memorable expression in this brilliantly constructed historical novel from the British author of the runaway success An Instance of the Fingerpost (1998). The title denotes a treatise on Neoplatonism composed by Manlius, a fifth-century (b.c.) nobleman and intellectual living in what would become known as Provence, who made it his mission to oppose "civilized values" to the threat of "barbarism"-through his scholarship, and also by securing a bishopric, then raising armies to protect Rome from invasion. The complex failure of Manlius's own "dream" is juxtaposed against two parallel stories, which are literally linked to the history of his manuscript and whose protagonists suffer the corruption of their own ideals in hauntingly similar fashion. The 14th-century poet Olivier de Noyen, a collector of manuscripts for the flamboyant Avignon papacy, heroically resists the machinations employed by Pope Clement VI to turn popular hatred of Jews into an explanation for the Black Plague as divine punishment-and pays a horrific price for his commitment to moral action. And in the years of WWII, as "Free France" succumbs to German invasion, historian Julien Barneuve (whose studies have led him to Manlius's text, preserved through de Noyen's efforts) reluctantly becomes "a censor and a propagandist" for a government that seizes on anti-Semitism to ensure its own survival-and is consumed in a personal holocaust. Each of the three men is ennobled, and victimized, by his love for a woman chosen to be sacrificed for a "greater good." And each endures a separation illustrating the Platonic concept that virtue is wholeness, evil the violent sundering of an ideal unity of harmonized parts. This imposingly intricate novel begins slowly, makes heavy demands on the reader, and rises to a stunningly dramatic crescendo. Pears has leapt to a new level, creating a novel of ideas even more suspenseful and revelatory than his justly acclaimed mysteries. First printing of 75,000; $150,000 ad/promo

Readers of An Instance of the Fingerpost (1997) know that Pears possesses a remarkable ability to portray intimate human drama against a vast historical canvas. They also know that his real subject is not just history but the history of ideas and, more specifically, the ever-delicate, sometimes lethal relationship between thought and action. His latest grand-scale historical thriller is even more ambitious (and more beyond genre) than Fingerpost, which tackled the Restoration and the birth of modern science. This time he juggles three different historical periods, radically different but united by the presence of a siege^-the fall of the Roman Empire in the fourth century, the spread of the plague in the fourteenth century, and World War II in the twentieth century. The setting in all three interlocking plots is Provence, and there is a love story at the center of each. The fabric that connects the characters and their stories across centuries is a neo-Platonic essay called "The Dream of Scipio" written by Manlius Hippomanes at the point when Gaul was about to be overrun by barbarians. Questions of engagement versus retreat, the contemplative life versus the active one, and the individual good versus the greater good come into play as, first, a Christian scholar in the fourteenth century and, then, a classicist in the 1940s formulate interpretations of Manlius' words, which translate into radical action. As Pears juggles these stories and themes in extremely complex but immensely satisfying three-part harmony, we come to see how actions both abominable and compassionate spring from the same idea. Pears' elaborate narrative triptych is dazzling for its structure, its complexity, and the richness of thought that gives it texture. But, finally, it is the passion of the love stories, undercutting bloodless philosophy while embracing the messiness of life, that lets the novel soar. ^-Bill Ott