Rating: 
Summary: INTELLIGENT AND ENGROSSING
Review: The more times change the more we, as individuals, remain the same. The Dream Of Scipio follows three integrated storylines spread over two thousand years. Strip away the material surroundings of each story and we see the main characters facing the same problems and choices that all people must face when under crisis - do I do what I believe in or do I go along with the crowd for fear of upsetting the apple cart and/or continuing to benefit from the staus quo.
The Dream of Scipio, a very readable novel, shows how history is made not only by the decisions we make but by indecision.
Any novel that makes you 1) think and/or 2)encourages you to seek information on the novels subject is worthy of your time. This novel is worth the effort.
Rating:
Summary: The Shakespeare of historical fiction
Review: For those of you who know Iain Pears from his art mysteries, this book will be a monumental surprise in terms of its richness and intellectual weight. For those who enjoy Steven Saylor and Lindsey Davies this takes historical fiction to the next level of intricacy and introspection. The book weaves three stories that interact with each other through the thin parchment of time. Each is a story of virtue, civilization and principle struggling to find a foothold in a time of panic, dispiritedness and decay. Manlius, Olivier and Julien live in Provence separated by hundreds of years, and yet face the same questions about the role of virtue and civilization at a time when life is so rudimentary that these seem quaint notions. They face the choice of fighting for a principle that is hopelessly lost, or seeming virtuous in salvaging some "middle ground". Each leaves enough of a mark for the one that follows to observe him thru the fractured mirrors of hearsay and old manuscripts copied many times over. I won't spoil the punch line by describing the characters any further, but it surprised me that the character I admired thru most of the book wasn't whose inner virtue shone in the end. But like any good book, this book is a mirror in which you can look at yourself, and who you like in it says as much about you as anything else. Great book to hole up with for the Christmas vacation.
Rating: 
Summary: Thoughtful
Review: A very interesting book, full of philosophy and the occasional hint of actual wisdom. Some of it is a touch half-baked, and some of the parallels of the stories seemed forced on occasion, but overall a well-written book that is well worth your time.
Rating:
Summary: Moral issues for our time
Review: The Dream of Scipio by Iain Pears is one of the most provocative books that I have read in a long time. Afterwards, I read An Instance of the Fingerpost and Death and Restoration. While An Instance of the Fingerpost was a fine mystery, one of the best historical mysteries, neither book is a match for The Dream of Scipio. There are so many facets to this novel that I had to read it a second time. Our four dimensional universe is fixed in place so that all three stories have the same surroundings, but time and historical documents connect the human tragedies and events. I was fascinated by the moral dilemmas facing Manlius Hippomanes, Oliver de Noyen, and Julien Barneuve in times of upheavals in society. Not only are these men intelligent and thoughtful, but also each one is attracted to a woman who is connected to the resulting tragic events. Two act to save their societies, but sacrifice the morality of their souls. The third acts against his moral code and saves a group within his society. Personally, I believe that each one of us must continually examine our actions and beliefs. The stories told in The Dream of Scipio indicate how bizarre are the consequences of even reasoned thoughts and actions. For me, it is a book that has changed my view of human nature. As Julien says after he is betrayed by both of his friends near the end of WWII and is quoting from Manlius, “The evil done by men of goodwill is the worst of all.” And then Julien adds, “We have done terrible things, for the best of reasons, and that makes it worse.” Words for our own time and country.
Rating:
Summary: the best novel I've read this year
Review: I cannot remember when a book has stayed with me for weeks after I read it and I continue to be overwhelmed with Mr. Pears craft in writing. I found the book to be so enthralling that I ordered an earlier title of his. The book requires attention but most anything that's worth having or doing does. I use this word with care: superb!
Rating:
Summary: A Novel on which to Examine Your Values
Review: I purchased this book because of the author and I was not disappointed. Although it lacks the final shocks of An Instance of the Fingerpost, Scipio does provide a measure of subtle surprise at the end in a way which crosses up the reader's expectations. In essence, this is a novel of dichotomies and choices: decline or renewal, ignorance or learning, altruism or selfishness, resistance or submission and most of all, morality or amorality. Each of the three major characters, a late Roman aristrocrat and sometimes philosopher, a medieval church beauracrat and poet, and a twentieth century academic, faces all of these choices and each appears to mark out his course early on in the story. Nonetheless, the ending point is not what the reader anticipates over the first three quarters of the text. One of the key focal points around which the choices revolve is the long, unfortunate history of antisemetism in Western Christianity in its late classical, medieval and modern manifestations. Again, the way in which each character confronts and responds to actual mistreatment of Jews highlights the moral ambiguities and choices that Scipio is about. The ultimate payoff in comparing the short and long term outcomes to Manlius, Olivier and Julien is a subtle but highly powerful moral lesson which is seldom, if ever done so well in contemporary fiction. I suspect that this sounds a bit obscure to the reader, but I don't want to spoil the analytical exercise or the teaching of the novel. As with Fingerpost, this is an incremental exercise of many layers and the gradual movement through those layers reveals Pears' real genius. Reading Scipio reflectively is not only an instructive project, but, more importantly, it will be an enriching one as well.
Rating:
Summary: A Book of Rare Genius
Review: A good book can teach you how to question yourself to your very soul. A good book keeps you company forever. This is a good book. Others have done the plot adequately so I won't remark on that except to say that those who think the action is slow and characters are not well-drawn have been brain-whacked by too many Oprah picks wherein the bizarre can pass for the profound as long as it doesn't slow down so you can get a good look at it. This book is profound in the way that Moby Dick is profound. In moral scope.In an age where moral fiber is stretched pretty thin here comes a book to remind us what morality is, and more to the point, what it isn't. It is a novel of light as compared to a dark novel such as Sopie's Choice (by William Styron) because in Scipio's Dream the seduction of paradox cannot ultimately confound moral choice. How does one make a moral choice? What makes Solomon's of us all is to remember that any choice must be made for love of something rather than fear of something. What keeps us safe from seduction is to remember that the good, the true, and the beautiful are inseparable and whenever our decision separates them ( by thinking we are forced to choose one over the other) due to the seeming necessity of the times, we will be guilty of an immoral choice and stuck forever in the same problem we had hoped to solve. Only one of the three heroes succeeded in finding his way out of the moral paradox.
A. B. Curtiss, author of Depression is a Choice: Winning the Fight Without Drugs.
Rating:
Summary: Complex and beautiful
Review: In "An Instance of the Fingerpost" Iain Pears proved himself to be an author of tremendous originality and skill, taking what might have been a relatively mundane murder mystery and turning it into a literary study of perception. In "The Dream of Scipio" he has gone one step further and written a novel that spreads perspective over 1500 years, and whose primary plot point is an idea. Obviously, this is not the conventional way to write a novel, and in the hands of someone less skilled it would be a disaster. However, Pears able hands have produced a work bursting at the seams with ideas. It would be difficult to offer a plot summary in the traditional sense, but I am going to attempt to summarize the themes and settings of the book. I would like to apologize in advance if I seem vague, but it would be difficult to discuss the plot in any detail without ruining the book. As I alluded to earlier, just as "An Instance of the Fingerpost" considered a central plot point from four perspectives, so to does "The Dream of Scipio" from three. The difference is that the first examined something vary tactile (a murder) from four contemporary viewpoints, but in this instance the characters are considering a manuscript (or more accurately, a philosophy) and are separated by 1500 years. What links these otherwise temporally diverse men are the times and place in which they live and the women they love. Each is living during the shattering of civilization: Manlius during the winter of the Roman Empire, Olivier during the plague, and Julien during World War II. Moreover, they all live in France, in Provence, and almost the entirety of the novel takes place in the vicinity of Avignon. As such, there are historical echoes that resonate down through the ages. Perhaps the most startling of these echoes are the women they love. Each is an outcast in her own way, and all of them have their fates wrapped up with those of the Jews, who were horribly persecuted in each time period. Pears hints at reincarnation for these three couples, but that might be too obvious a turn of phrase. Perhaps it would be more accurate to say that they are linked by their knowledge of those who came before, and are striving to overcome the failures of the past and preserve civilization for another day. It would seem that Pears sees civilization as a spiral ascending upwards. At certain points on the spiral we will revisit the errors of the past, and even as mankind's advancement has provided the tools for increasing horror exponentially, it has also given us the lessons to try to prevent it. We won't always succeed, and frequently the solution will actually set civilization back more than the problem, but the attempt can be (although isn't always) valuable in and off itself. That's "A Dream of Scipio" in a nutshell. It is obviously not a "conventional" novel, and if your looking for something light and easy, this is one you'll want to skip. However, if you are looking for something that will really make you think, that will in fact force you to think just to keep up with the plot, then this is a novel for you.
Rating: 
Summary: Ultimately Lacking in Dramatic Relevance
Review: When I say this book lacks in dramatic relevance, I mean as an effective vessel for the communication of the ideas it is apparently concerned with. The characters are unsympathetic: Manilus, quick to use his philosophy of "virtue" as a justification for what really amounts to bigotry against Christians and Jews, is ultimately dishonest in his action: he assumes an Archbishopric despite the fact that he despises Christianity because it serves his political ends. He is much like the last of the three characters, Julien, who, after much self-obsessed navel gazing, arrives at an equally dramatic state (i.e., moribund). The middle character, Olivier, is the most intersesting, but how can one juxtapose the theological/philosophical ideas of Manilus and Julien with those of a 14th Century character without any mention of the seminal philosophical treatise of that, or any, time (Summa Theologica, by Acquinas)? It all begins to ring false. The narrative is excessively idiosyncratic in structure, and I disagree therefore with the Amazon reviewer's classification of this book as "compulsive" reading. It is devoid of the vitality of such reading, and is ultimately more satisfying to the author, one gathers, than the reader.
Rating:
Summary: Some Words on Understanding as Opposed to Faith
Review: It's been my experience that characters appearing in philosophical fiction often lack the more fleshy development of their counterparts elsewhere, and that is the case with this novel. But it's also been my experience that this doesn't matter much if the ideas are strong, explicated, argued, and finally illustrated to some degree in the story itself-as though the body of man and his external trappings matter not at all when the subject is his thinking and its direction. And that's what Pears has done. Among the items that are aired in discussion, Pears's most favored seems to be that Blind Faith will gain no one that coveted point beyond this earth; that Understanding is the vehicle that brings about success; that it is the Search for the Truth that counts, not unquestioned devotion to an old bible. In view of the rise of Christian fervor in this country and Islamic fundamentalism elsewhere, the book achieves greater significance than first meets the eye, as Pears intertwines a trio of stories focusing on an equal number of men who reside in the same region of the planet, except there are hundreds of years between them and the historical junctures are important: the fall of the Roman Empire, the Black Plague, World War II. All points during which men's faith and understanding were tested.. Although I enjoyed this book, because there are no chapter headings-only space between changes of character and time-it took some effort getting used to the transitions. At the same time, many of the transitions are to be appreciated as the author thought to link the character from the previous scene. A good book. Especially so for a torpid mind.
|
