Rating: 
Summary: fabulous but demanding
Review: This is not light summer reading. It is a fascinating historical novel that subtly sheds light on the continuum of Jews as the world's scapegoats, while also broadening the issue to make the reader ponder their own actions in life. How important is it to remain true to your values? Is it better to do what you feel is morally right or what can be coldly calculated will turn out well? Reminds us that history is subject to interpretation and reinterpretion. Highly recommended for the read as well as the questions it poses. A very unusual book.
Rating:
Summary: Breath-takingly good!
Review: I would not have thought it possible, but Pears has outdone his previous novel, Instance of the Fingerpost. Sophisticated ideas are seamlessly integrated with three thrillingly paced and engrossing plots. Pears' capacity to bring to life the worldviews of characters from remote periods in history is remarkable, and his attention to telling details delights page after page. Add to this the fact that the issues he raises are crucial ones for the survival of humanity. For the thoughtful reader, I cannot recommend this book highly enough.
Rating:
Summary: The scope is amazing!
Review: This is my first Iian Pears novel. I am amazed. Amazed at the scope, at the ease with which Pears weaves through the centuries and lets us share in this archeological experience in Southern France as if indeed we were putting the pieces together of these several layers of human occupation of a site. I have enjoyed it so much, I am going back and starting it again. Also, his characters are very believable and at times, so closely modelled on known historical lives that this reader, an art historian by training, wished the characters and the works mentioned existed outside of the printed pages. I am glad I read it, and will reread immediately.
Rating:
Summary: Wisdom
Review: I started my summer with the hugely distasteful, "Angels and Demons," by Dan Brown, his precursor to, "The Da Vinci Code;" and then, thankfully, strode into midsummer with the perfect antidote, "The Dream of Scipio," by Iain Pears. Where the former ripped through a fantasy-land of paranoia, the latter provides a deep exploration of wisdom, love, friendship, bigotry, betrayal, relative morality - and, well, a whole existential landscape. Mr. Pears uses the common literary device of telling three stories in three different historical periods. My usual response to this device is to prefer one plot line, or set of characters over another. Not so with "The Dream of Scipio." I found myself lost in each story, and believed equally in each character and set of circumstances; and, without belaboring the plot Mr. Pears managed to hold the threads of similarity between each story with a masterful hand. My advice? Skip the blockbuster, and go for the lower profile offering. "The Dream of Scipio," rewards with all the pleasures of an extremely well written tale.
Rating: 
Summary: Dampened by erudition, Scipio never catches fire
Review: 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.
Rating: 
Summary: This is not a book you will put down!
Review: Pears is a super versatile writer. His books vary widely (from his light and amusing art history/mystery series to the much more serious and scholarly An Instance of the Fingerpost). The only thing that's a guarantee when picking up one of Pears' books is that it will be a great read-and The Dream of Scipio is no exception. The book is an in-depth examination of three moments of crisis-the fall of Rome, the collapse of Europe during the first onslaught of the Black Death and the height of World War II. All three moments forced ordinary-and extraordinary-people to make difficult moral decisions. The stories Pears tells focus on the lives of three men-all of whom see themselves as bearing the torch of civilization at a time when civilization is in danger of collapse. Because these men see themselves as intellectuals and set apart from the rest of humanity, they believe that the choices they make are justified-but ironically, the choices Manlius, Olivier, and Julian make reveal the weakness of humanity. As an historian, I was fascinated by this book. Pears really does get everything right (a rarity among historical novelists) but in addition to that, he makes us uncomfortably aware of how our choices can and often do have consequences beyond our intentions. More than many historians, Pears provided me with a deeper understanding of how and why anti-Semitism, or even more simply, hatred of outsiders, has flourished throughout history. A depressing but really thought-provoking book.
Rating:
Summary: Dreams during history's nightmares
Review: This is one of the best books I have read in perhaps twenty years. Tragically Shakespearean in its story, and grand in its historical scope the stories of Manlius, Olivier and Julien overlap in many respects except their individual temporal place. Each is worldly in their own way in worlds that are collapsing around them, they are free thinkers in the prison of the times in which each exist and are in turn captive.
Each in their own way attempt to provide some hope in hopeless times and it is this struggle which provides for a great story and a book which is difficult to put down even when finished.
This book is a great intellectual adventure and highly recommended.
Rating:
Summary: A male version of "The Hours"
Review: I found this novel a "heavy" read, although I did enjoy it, and it kind of reminded my of The Hours for men - with its three interlinked stories from different time periods. I've just finished reading "The Dante Club" by Matthew Pearl, and I think that this novel kind of falls into the same catagory: literate, academic, sophisticated, but at the same time readily accessable to the layman Briefly, The Dream of Scipio is an inventive, gloriously detailed historical novel told from multiple viewpoints. But Pears has set himself an additional challenge by spreading his narrators over several centuries: there's the fifth century French nobleman and bishop, Manlius, a civilized man who has embraced the uncouth Christian faith in order to protect what he holds dear; an 11th-century scholar and troubadour named Olivier de Noyen, the famously ill-fated admirer of a married girl; and Julien Barneuve, an early 20th-century scholar of de Noyen who discovers, through him, a magnificent manuscript of Manlius's called "The Dream of Scipio." Out of all three stories I thought that the most recent set in WW2 had the most resonance for me - maybe because it was historically the closest. Reading this novel certainly perked my interest in reading other novels by Pears. A very accomplished and dynamic novel. Michael
Rating:
Summary: a lovely book
Review: Combines wonderful story telling with the erudition of a novel of ideas. Sensuous and beautiful.
Rating:
Summary: An Erudite, Thought-Provoking, Insightful Novel (4.5 Stars)
Review: Set in the Provencal region in and around Avignon in the South of France during three critical junctures in history--times when the very fabric of society was disintigrating--the Dream of Scipio by British author Iain Pears is an unusual, thought-provoking novel that skilfully interweaves three stories which, though separated by centuries, are united by the urgency of their respective times and by the philosophy contained in a manuscript. The oldest story takes place during the demise of the Roman Empire in the 5th century when the Empire's control over Gaul (modern-day France) was being eroded by Barbarian forces. Particularly, the story is set during the period when the Provencal region in issue was on the brink of invasion by opposing Barbarian kings (by the Burgundians on one side and the Visigoths on the other). The next story on the timeline takes place in the 14th century during the brief period in history when the papal court was situated in the city of Avignon; particulary, the story is set during that terrifying period when the Black Death swept through the region, swiftly and horrifically annihilating nearly everyone in its path. The most recent story takes place in the 20th century during the German occupation of France during World War II. This is a story that examines the nature of civilised society and its relationship to barbarism. A dominant parallel between the stories concerns the attitude toward and treatment of the Jews during these three distinct yet similar periods. Pears challenges us by means of this parallel to ponder over what it really means to call oneself civilised.
This is also a story about love and apathy, loyalty and betrayal, friendship and sacrifice. It is a story about the moral dilemma faced by those placed in the unenviable position of having to choose when the alternatives are of the "damned if I do and damned if I don't" variety. It is a story about moral (or amoral) choices made which jolt the reader into asking: Does the end (whatever and however noble it may be) necessarily justify the means? Specifically (and paradoxically), what if the means of achieving is directly opposed to--is indeed antithetical to--that which one hopes to achieve? Are there some things that are worth having at any cost or are there are some prices that are simply too high to pay? At just under 400 pages, this is a complex, intelligent, and intellectually satisfying novel. It is not, however, a novel for everyone. It is neither a happy tale nor a light read, and it is certainly not the sort of book that can be put down for days at a time. The complexity of both the structure as well as the subject matter require attentive daily reading in order to keep a firm hold of the threads of each story, and I personally found it required a certain amount of discipline initially to do just that. (That said, I also found the novel to be unputdownable for the last 100 pages or so.) This is very much a thinking person's novel--one which generates questions and encourages reflection and discussion (and would, I think, be an excellent selection for those involved in a book discussion group). Erudite and thought-provoking, this is a novel which, at least in my opinion, is well worth the time, initial effort, and reflection demanded of it.
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