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SCIENCE FICTION/Pears Iain
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1st Floor SCIENCE FICTION/Pears Iain Due Apr 6, 2024
1st Floor SCIENCE FICTION/Pears, Iain Due Apr 3, 2024
Subjects
Genres
Spy stories
Published
New York : Alfred A. Knopf 2016.
Language
English
Main Author
Iain Pears (-)
Edition
First edition
Physical Description
509 pages ; 25 cm
ISBN
9781101946824
Contents unavailable.
Review by New York Times Review

NOBODY CAN TANGLE a text like Iain Pears. His best-known novel, "An Instance of the Fingerpost," explored a 17th-century Oxford murder and its aftermath through the memoirs of four unreliable narrators, each hotly disputing the others' versions of reality, science, religion and justice. After nearly 700 pages of deposition, when the guilty are finally sorted from the hard-to-call-innocent, many readers will understandably have already lost track of their scorecards. Now, almost 20 years later, Pears's latest novel presents a complexly interwoven series of narrative entanglements that stretch across time, alternate universes and at least several textual realities - from Elizabethan pastoral romance and multiple universe theory to a Narnia-like fantasy world and Cold War international intrigue. What's the difference between all these systems of order, knowledge and storytelling? the attentive reader might ask. And the answer might well be: no difference at all. They are equally "real" and equally "unreal" - take your pick. With a nod to Philip Sidney (and Tom Stoppard), Pears unreels a series of stories that travel in several directions at once: from past to future, from future to past, and from fictive to actual and back again. With one foot set in the 1960s, the novel's central character, Henry Lytten, is an Oxford fellow with a fondness for the fantasy landscapes of local celebrities like C. S. Lewis and J. R. R. Tolkien. When Henry's not working for the British government flushing out Russian spies, he meets with an Inklings-like group of popular-fiction fans at a local pub and reads aloud from his rapidly accumulating notes for the tale of a sociologically believable fantasy realm called Anterwold. There the political differences of the inhabitants - urban and pastoral, rich and poor, insider and outsider - are kept in what-should-be-eternal balance by a ritual known as the Abasement. In the meantime (or somewhere before or after the meantime, it's not always clear) what Henry doesn't know is that a far-future totalitarian bureaucracy is trying to impose its own system of permanent order on a hysteria-prone population. In response, a "psychomathematician" named Angela Meerson designs a "time machine," journeys back to 1936 and ultimately turns Henry's "outline" for a fantasy novel into a self-contained physical universe threatening the stability of her so-called real one. When her colleagues try to fetch her home, paradoxes and conundrums abound, and it grows increasingly difficult for even the most astute reader to distinguish the "fictive" from the "real," the "now" from the "then" and the "what might be" from the "what has already been." (To help readers keep track, Pears even designed an app to accompany the British edition: It resembles a choose-your-own-adventure plot or one of those multicolored subway maps that fill London tourists with the false assurance that they know exactly where they are.) It's hard to decide when or where a story like this begins or ends and what marks its most important stops along the way. Take Rosie Wilson, the teenage girl who feeds Henry's cat. Early in the novel, she descends into Henry's cellar (which is cluttered with Tolkien's displaced possessions) and crosses a doorway into Henry's Anterwold, much like her fictional predecessors in the Narnia novels. When she comes out again, she leaves behind a doppelgänger who develops a stubborn ability to live her own life and send the Abasement ritual off course. And so it grows increasingly difficult to tell which "story" (and which "Rosie") takes precedence over the other one. Who did what, where and when? Where does history (which the far-future totalitarians of this novel consider a form of "the occult") end and fiction begin? Does any story possess a true origin or beginning, or is it always already implicated in the imaginings of other books, other people, othernesses? "He who understood the darkness," one of this novel's numerous altercating storytellers concludes, "would also understand the Return, for the beginning and the end were one and the same." Jacques Derrida, meet Bilbo Baggins. Bilbo, Jacques. "Arcadia" is not an easy book to summarize, but it's a book that spends a lot of time trying to summarize itself. Most of its lengthy scenes involve significant characters exchanging expository dialogue about their various inter-involved stories and plot trajectories. And while there's usually a pleasurable sense that the numerous narrative entanglements are well designed and just perplexing enough to inspire curiosity (for the most part), the physical landscapes often feel anonymous and inexplicit, whether it's Anterwold's pastoral bits ("a wooded landscape; clumps of trees and brushwood mainly, no river and no valley") or the far-future's mother of all libraries, described simply as "20 miles long, four wide and 12 stories high." Pears is a great writer of ideas and intellectual adventure, but not quite so good at envisioning worlds. Generally speaking," Angela Meerson reminds herself late in the book, "our minds impose an entirely artificial order on the world. It is the only way that such an inadequate instrument as our brain can function. It cannot deal with the complexity of reality, so simplifies everything until it can, putting events into an artificial order so they can be dealt with one at a time, rather than all at once as they should be." In other words, if you want to actually see how the real universe operates, get dementia. "An Instance of the Fingerpost" succeeded by inhabiting the often disastrously mistaken scientific and religious notions of four very different 17th-century men. Not quite so successfully, "Arcadia" leads readers into an escalating series of interconnected textual worlds and deliberately avoids helping them to achieve any final utopian vision. Find your own way home, this book seems to tell them. And good luck devising your maps along the way. SCOTT BRADFIELD'S most recent novel is "The People Who Watched Her Pass By."

Copyright (c) The New York Times Company [May 10, 2016]
Review by Booklist Review

*Starred Review* Pears seems to love three-part harmony, though time, not music, is his medium of choice. In Stone's Fall (2009) and The Dream of Scipio (2002), he weaved remarkably complex stories set in three different time periods that echoed one another, fugue-like, with interlocking themes. Here he ups the ante dramatically: there are three distinct time periods again, but they exist simultaneously, the linear notion of time having been replaced by an Einsteinian continuum. Prepare to experience a little narrative vertigo here, even in summary: one of these worlds is recognizable, 1960 Britain, where a tweedy Shakespeare professor and part-time spy, Henry Lytten, gathers with colleagues to spin tales of fantasy worlds the pop novels they dream of writing; the second world is a dystopian future in which Angela Meerson, a maverick psychomathematician who harnesses emotions to power her calculations, has created a super-duper time machine; and, finally, there is Arcadia, called Anterworld, a universe that Meerson has created from Henry's notes describing his would-be fantasy novel. Dizzy yet? The spins are just beginning. Thanks to Meerson's machine, various characters, including a 15-year-old girl named Rosalind (Henry teaches Shakespeare, remember), jump from Cold War Britain to Anterworld, creating chaos in the process. If you think of what Stephen King did with time in 11/22/63 as being an undergraduate survey course in physics, then Pears' novel is the equivalent of Princeton's Institute for Advanced Study. It all starts with a problem common to every age: Meerson's machine attracts the attention of the politicos, who see it as a way of consolidating power, leaving the scientist no choice but to climb into the contraption herself and decamp for another time, hoping to prevent the entire universe from being reshaped in the image of a bunch of thugs and reduced to ruin. That's hard enough to do in our linear world, but when you throw Einstein into the mix, and tinkering with one moment in time affects all other moments, well, it's a hell of a lot trickier than rocket science. Yes, Pears handles his vertiginous narrative with remarkable legerdemain, but that's only one part of this novel's appeal. As the characters intermingle in multiple time frames, as Rosalind teaches the men of Anterworld a thing or two about women, as Angela learns that emotions power more than mathematics, as Henry discovers that characters in fiction can take on a life of their own through sheer force of personality, we are struck with the improbable ability of human beings to connect with one another, in the flesh and across time. Arcadia is a novel about the power of narrative, both to corrupt and to humanize. Like most great translit fiction David Mitchell's The Bone Clocks (2014), Haruki Murakami's 1Q84 (2011), and Nick Harkaway's Angelmaker (2012) Pears' genre-bending, time-collapsing tour-de-force dazzles us with world building, but, beyond that, it reminds us that the people in those worlds survive by their stories and by the way those stories reverberate backward and forward, achieving, if only now and again, the perfect harmony we all crave.--Ott, Bill Copyright 2016 Booklist

From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.
Review by Publisher's Weekly Review

Pears's (An Instance of the Fingerpost) latest is a clever, well-constructed story. Living in an environmentally ravaged future governed by a technocratic so-called Scientific Government, the "psychomathematician" Angela Meerson builds a machine that could in theory access the resources of a parallel universe. However, the contraption turns out to be a good old-fashioned time machine that transports Meerson to pre-WWII Europe. Several decades later in 1960, she has built a new version of her machine in the cellar of the house of her lover, Henry Lytten, an Oxford literature scholar and intelligence agent who also dabbles in creative writing. Drawing heavily on the tropes of the Elizabethan pastoral and many other sources, Lytten has outlined a novel set in the fantasy realm of Anterworld. Anterworld is an oral culture whose priests are "Storytellers," scholar-bards who roam the land and impart wisdom through sacred tales. Meerson uses Lytten's sketchily conceived world to create a "latent" universe in her machine, a universe that gets activated, with unforeseen consequences, when a young girl named Rosie stumbles into the realm. Anterworld is meant to be derivative, borrowing from the long literary tradition of utopia and fantasy; this quality perhaps explains why although it gets the most attention of the novel's three narratives, Anterworld is the least enchanting. Nonetheless, Pears excels at stage-managing the multiple sets as the actors leap from the dystopian future, to England in the grips of the Cold War, to whenever Anterworld could be said to exist, altering history as they go. A fun, immersive, genre-bending ride. 75,000-copy first printing. (Feb.) © Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.

(c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Review by Library Journal Review

This complex, entertaining tale from British novelist Pears (An Instance of the Fingerpost) involves time travel, British spies betraying one another, and apocalyptic scenarios all folded together in a number of interconnected story lines. Closest to our times is Henry Lytten, an old Oxford scholar, amateur author, and part-time spy for the British government. Unbeknownst to him, his friend Angela Meerson is really a psychomathematician who has invented a time machine of sorts and has traveled to Henry's time, roughly the 1960s, to escape betrayal and maybe death many years in the future. With her invention, she has created another universe called Anterwold, drawing on ideas from a novel Henry is writing. A young girl who lives near Henry and sometimes feeds his cat has accidentally stepped into this world and has started up the machinations of several plots and love affairs. Angela is being hunted on many fronts, in many parallel universes, and the powerful leader from her time is anxious to get his hands on her machine to use for his own ends. VERDICT Pears weaves a diverse group of characters and multiple worlds from the idyllic to the Orwellian to create an impressive and quite enjoyable mystery fantasy. [See Prepub Alert, 8/24/15.]-James Coan, SUNY at Oneonta Lib. © Copyright 2016. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.

(c) Copyright Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
Review by School Library Journal Review

Henry Lytten, a British professor and struggling writer, is trying to complete an epic fantasy novel that will compete with the works of J.R.R. Tolkien and C.S. Lewis. He bounces ideas off his young neighbor, Rosie, who inadvertently enters Lytten's magical Anterworld through a portal in his basement. A brilliant physicist and a respected scholar are just two of the other main characters-each chapter is told from 10 different points of view. While perplexing at times, the three settings (1960s England, Anterworld, and a dystopian island off the coast of Scotland) help keep the time travel/alternate history stories centered, and there is a satisfying conclusion. The author also created an app called Arcadia for iOS devices. It's free to download and explore, but finishing the novel costs $3.99. In the app, readers can choose how they want to read the novel-stories by character ("The Young Girl's Tale, "The Scientist's Tale," etc.) or by setting. VERDICT This is metafiction at its best, and teens who like complicated science fiction will appreciate the challenge.-Sarah Hill, Lake Land College, Mattoon, IL © Copyright 2016. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.

(c) Copyright Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
Review by Kirkus Book Review

Arcadia: a kind of heaven on Earth. Arcade: a place where games are played. Somewhere between the two lies this odd confection by the restless, genre-hopping Pears (Stone's Fall, 2009, etc.). It's the artist's pleasure to create. But what of the philosopher's? As Pears' latest opens, a younger Inklinga member of the learned society to which C.S. Lewis and J.R.R. Tolkien belonged, that isis deep in a project with countless implications. "I want to construct a society that works," says Henry Lytten. "With beliefs, laws, superstitions, customs. With an economy and politics. An entire sociology of the fantastic." Alas, the 1960s will seem a golden age when that sociology takes shape. One of many possible futures, the world of the 23rd century, would do a robber baron proud. Bad corporatista Zoffany Oldmanter is determined to corner the market on everything; says our shadowy narrator, determined to thwart a hostile takeover, his priorities under the circumstances are to preserve his property and "prevent the entire universe being reshaped in the image of a bunch of thugs and reduced to ruin." Good luck, though if the future baddies seem to have a head start on time travel, Lytten has a lock on the fantastic, to say nothing of a pergola portal into a medieval-tinged time in which 11-year-old Jay, having determined that Lytten's assistant, Rosie, is not a fairy, blossoms into manhood after staring "a spirit in the eye without flinching" and otherwise proving that wispy bookworms are not without inner resources. Within those three broad swaths of time lie many alternate futures, and Pears darts from one to the other to the point that the reader who isn't confused isn't quite getting what he's up to. Suffice it to say that there's plenty of metacommentary on the art of storytelling, science fiction (ahem: "We say speculative fiction"), the destruction wrought by greed, and other weighty matters. A head-scratcher but an ambitious pleasure. When puzzled, press on: Pears' yarn is worth the effort. Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.

Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.

9781101970836|excerpt Pears / ARCADIA 1 Imagine a landscape. Bathed in sunshine, ­sweet-­smelling from the gentle shower that fell overnight then stopped as dawn broke. A dense grove of holm oak stands at the foot of a hill, damp with the drops of ­soft-­sounding water which leave the ground moist but firm underfoot. In the distance a sliver of water, bright and glittering, reflects the brightness of the sky. The wide river is of a blue so translucent that it is almost indistinguishable from the heavens above. Only the vegetation marks the division between the fields and the range of ­low-­lying hills beyond. It is warm now, but will be hot later on; there is not a cloud to be seen. Down by the river, there are the harvesters with their pitchforks, fanning out across the fields, some already at work. A young boy looks down on them. They are far away, and he sees that they are talking quietly and seriously, eager to get on with a day's work. Over his shoulder is an empty leather bag; he is going for the water which the men will soon need when the sun rises higher. The stream is cool from the hills beyond, which mark the end of their world. He does not know what lies outside it. His entire universe is here, the few villages with their rivalries, the seasonal round of crops, animals and festivities. He is about to leave it for ever. His name is Jay. He is eleven years old and is an entirely normal boy apart from his tendency to bother people with questions. Why are you doing this? What is that for? What are these? His insatiable ­curiosity--­considered unseemly by his elders and tiresome by those of his own ­age--­means that he has few friends but, on the whole, he is, as his mother continually tells people, no trouble really. Today the boy's mind is empty. It is too glorious, and he knows that the warmth on his back and the brilliant sunshine will not last much longer. Already the birds are gathering, preparing for their departure; he does not want to waste a moment in thought. He reaches the stream and kneels down to bathe, feeling the icy cold on his face and his neck, washing away the sweat. Then he bends over and drinks, cupping the water in his hands and slurping it up. He sits back on his haunches, staring at the water as it reflects the sun in its path, listening to the birds and the gentle sound of the breeze in the trees on the other side of the stream. Then he hears an odd noise, low, even almost melodic. It stops, and Jay shakes his head, then unslings the leather bag to begin filling it. The noise starts up again, the same tone, like the wind humming through a gap in a window board in winter. It is coming from the other side of a great outcrop of rock which forces the stream to curve in its path down the hill. He gets up, dusts the earth from his bare knees, and wades through the water to where he thinks the sound is coming from. There is an overhang in the rock, and under it an indentation which forms a small cave. It is dark inside, with the faint, but not unpleasant, smell of rotting vegetation. He peers intently, but sees nothing. It is very perplexing, but no more than that. He is not afraid. He remembers he has a job to do and is about to go back across the stream to the water bag when he sees a sudden slice of light inside the cave. He starts, and blinks, but he has made no mistake. The light is getting larger. Not bright, just brighter than the surrounding darkness, sufficient only to illuminate the gloom; he can see the ferns, with drops of water hanging off the fronds, the shape of the rocks at the back, the moss and lichen growing over everything. Then he sees a figure in the light. Hazy, difficult to make out, but definitely a person of some sort. He knows all the stories about the creatures of the woods; the devils and demons, the fairies and the monsters. It is why no one goes there alone, not even in a cold winter when fuel is short. The woods are dangerous to anyone who ventures in unprotected. Now he realises all the stories were true; his feet and legs are under a mysterious power which stops them obeying his commands to run. He tries to ­sing--­the other way of deterring ­evil--­but no sound comes from his mouth. It is too late. The figure steps forward and stops. It has seen him. Jay feels he should go down on his knees and beg for mercy, but he can't do that either. He just stands, mute, trembling and helpless. He instinctively casts his eyes down to the earth, but still sneaks a glance through his eyelashes. What he sees gives him hope. It is a fairy, that is certain. It has the form of a girl, scarcely bigger than he is, but its face is ­gentle--­although all the world knows that could change in an instant. He puts his fingertips together and brings them to his lips as he bows, then looks up. The fairy smiles, and he relaxes a little. He got that right, at least. Fairies are sticklers for politeness, and once you have been polite to them and they have accepted the courtesy, they are bound to be peaceable back. So he has heard. Better still, it then repeats his gesture, and bows back to him! He almost laughs out loud in relief and astonishment, but this unexpected response gesture robs him of any notion of what to do next. So he makes a mistake, stepping out of the rules which the stories have handed down. He speaks. "Who are you?" The creature looks angry, and he regrets his words bitterly. "I apologise, my lady," he blurts out in the old language, the words of respect he has heard in tales. "How may I serve you?" It smiles once more, a radiant, celestial smile that brings the warmth back to his body. It raises its hands in what he takes to be a gesture of ­peace--­and is gone. ... Henry Lytten laid down the manuscript he had been reading and peered over his glasses at his audience. He always did that. It was an affected, donnish sort of mannerism, but nobody minded or even noticed. They all had their own affectations and they were long used to his. "Bit of Ovid in there," one said, screwing up his eyes and examining the ceiling. "Amores 3, if I recall. You're plagiarising again." He never looked directly at people when he spoke. "So I am," Lytten said. "Consider it a subtle allusion to the pastoral tradition." "If I must." "Is that all?" another asked, beer mug in one hand, pipe in the other, a trail of tobacco ash falling onto the old wooden table as he spoke. "It's a bit short for twenty years' work." "No," Lytten replied. "Do you want more?" "Where are the dragons? A whole chapter, and not a single dragon?" Lytten scowled. "There are no dragons." "No dragons?" said the other in mock astonishment. "What about ­wizards?" "No." "Trolls?" "No. Nothing of the sort." "Thank God for that. Go on." It was a very small pub, and shortly after noon on a Saturday. The tiny windows let in little light even at the front; in the room at the back it was almost totally dark, the occasional shaft of illumination from the back door cutting a beam through the thick tobacco smoke which already filled the room. All around were bare walls decorated only with small mirrors, the ­once-­white paint stained yellow by years of smoke. The four men occupied the entire area; occasionally someone else would stick a head through and be met with frowns. The landlord discouraged such interruptions. The group had the back room on a Saturday. They came every week for a few hours of masculine conversation, none of them even thinking of being at home with their wives and families. They were more used to the company of other men, and if asked why they had married in the first place, many of Lytten's friends and colleagues would have had difficulty coming up with an answer. Lytten, who had paused so that he could make sure that the ­others really did want to hear what he had written and weren't just being polite, sipped his beer, then picked up his pile of paper once more. "Very well. You can't say I didn't give you a choice. Pay attention now." Jay was trembling and in tears by the time he got back to the fields; he headed for the women working away from the men, instinctively thinking they would be more understanding. With a surge of relief, he saw his mother, the brown scarf knotted around her head to keep off the sun. He shouted and ran, buried himself into her warm and comforting body, shaking and sobbing uncontrollably. "What is it? Jay, what's happened?" She examined him quickly, checking for injuries. "What is it?" She bent down level with his face and scrutinised him, holding him by the shoulders. The other women gathered round. "Had a fright," said an old woman there to supervise the younger ones. Jay was sure they wouldn't believe him. Who would? They would think he was just trying to get out of work. His mother would be ashamed of him, would say he was letting the family down. "What is it?" his mother said more urgently. "I saw . . . I saw a . . . I don't know. I saw someone. Something. Up there. It just appeared in a cave. Out of nothing. Then vanished again." There was a titter of nervous laughter; his mother looked alarmed and annoyed at the same time. "What do you mean? Where?" He pointed back up the hill. "Beyond the stream," he said. "In the woods?" He nodded. "I didn't mean to go there. But I heard a strange noise." "He's making it up," a woman said: Dell, a gossip who never had a good word to say for anyone. She'd once been beautiful, it was said, but the hardness in her face had long since covered any loveliness. Her scorn was enough to make Jay's mother straighten up with defiance. "We'll go and look," she said. "Come on, Jay. I'm sure it was just a trick of the light. You had a fright, but don't worry." Her kindness was reassuring and, ignoring the others who clearly now thought this was some sort of childish joke, Jay's mother took him by the hand. Only one other woman came as well, the eldest of them, who thought it her duty to be present at every disturbance, however minor. Everyone else got back to work. Jay retraced his steps to the stream, then over it and into the woods. The old widow bowed and muttered to herself to ward off the spirits until they all stood once more, looking into the cave. There was nothing. No sound, no light, and certainly no fairy. "It was just here. It really was," he said, looking to see whether they were angry or dismissive. He got no hint, though; their expressions were completely unreadable. "What did this fairy look like?" "A girl," Jay said. "She had dark hair. She smiled at me. She was so ­beautiful." "How was she dressed?" "Oh, like nothing you have ever seen! A red robe, shiny and glittering, like it was made of rubies." "You've never seen a ruby," the old widow said. "How would you know?" "It shone in the light, dazzlingly bright," he insisted. "It was wonderful. Then she just disappeared." The women looked at each other, then shrugged helplessly. "Well, there's nothing here now," his mother said. "So I think it would be best to forget about it." "Listen, Jay. This is important," said the old widow. She bent down and looked him firmly in the eyes. "Not a word. You understand? The sooner this is forgotten the better. You don't want a reputation for being mad, or a trickster, do you?" He shook his head. "Good. Now, if I hear that you've been talking about this, then I'll give you the biggest beating of your life, and I'm a strong old woman. Now, get your water, and let's go back to work." There was an atmosphere for the rest of the day, an odd div­ision between the men, who knew nothing, worked cheerfully and well, and the women, whose mood was subdued, almost fearful. Jay himself remained shaken; he knew, or rather he hoped, that he had not been dreaming. But he also realised that it was unlikely anyone would ever believe him. Lytten glanced at his companions and smiled briefly. Most were, like him, men in their fifties; all had the ­care-­worn, slightly shabby look of their type. None cared much for elegant clothes, preferring battered tweeds and comfortable, solid shoes. The collars of their shirts were frayed, except for those whose wives turned their shirts before admitting they were beyond repair. The jackets had leather patches sewn onto the elbows to prolong their life; most had socks that had been carefully, and repeatedly, darned. They were, he supposed, his closest friends, people he had known in some cases for decades. Yet he didn't really think of them as friends, or even as colleagues. He didn't really know what they were. Just part of his life; the people he spent Saturday with, after some had been in the library and others had worked on the business of teaching for an hour or two. All of them had a secret passion, which they hid carefully from most of the world. They liked stories. Some had a weakness for detective tales, and had volumes of ­green-­backed Penguins stacked out of sight behind the ­leather-­bound books on ­Anglo-­Saxon history or classical philosophy. Others had an equally fervent and illicit love of science fiction, and adored nothing better than curling up with a tale of interstellar exploration in between lectures on the evolution and reception of the ­nineteenth-­century Russian novel. Others preferred spy stories and adventures, whether Rider Haggard or Buchan or (for the more raffish) James Bond. Lytten had a weakness for fantastical tales of imaginary lands, peopled (if that was the word) by dragons and trolls and goblins. It was what had drawn him, many years before, into the company of Lewis and Tolkien. It was an enthusiasm which had taken possession of him when he was thirteen, packed off to bed for four months with measles, then mumps, then chicken pox. So he read. And read, and read. There was nothing else to do; there wasn't yet even a wireless set to listen to. While his mother kept on bringing him worthy and improving works to read, his father would smuggle in nonsense. Tales of knights and fair maidens, of gods and goddesses, of quests and adventures. He would read, then lie back and dream, improving the stories where he thought the authors had gone wrong. The dragons would become nastier, the women cleverer, the men less boringly virtuous. Eventually he had started penning such stories himself, but was always too reticent to show them to anyone. He went to war, then became a scholar, a man of intellectual distinction, and the stories were left unfinished. Besides, it was all very well to criticise the works of others, but in fact it was quite hard, he discovered, to tell a story. His first efforts were not that much better than those he so easily faulted. Gradually he formed a new ambition, and it was this that he was now, on a quiet Saturday in October 1960, going to reveal in all its as yet unfinished glory to his friends in the pub. He had spent years discussing the efforts of others; now, after much prodding, it was his turn. He hoped they would be responsive; members had come and gone over the years, and the best had ­disappeared--­Lewis sick in Cambridge, Tolkien in retirement, becoming too famous and too old to write much any more. He missed them; he would have enjoyed watching Lewis's face. "Very well, gentlemen, if you could put your drinks down and pay attention, then I will explain." "About time." "In brief . . ." "Surely not?" "In brief, I am creating the world." He stopped and looked around. The others seemed unimpressed. "No goblins?" one asked hopefully. Lytten sniffed. "No goblins," he said. "This is serious. I want to construct a society that works. With beliefs, laws, superstitions, customs. With an economy and politics. An entire sociology of the fantastic." "A story as well, I hope?" "Naturally. But stories take place in societies, otherwise they cannot exist. The first must precede the second." "Don't we have one already? A society, that is." "I want a better one." "Might it not become a bit boring?" asked Thompson, briefly pulling the pipe out of his mouth to speak. This time he addressed his remarks to the mirror on the far wall. "I mean, I suppose you are aiming at the ideal society, but perfection cannot change. How can things happen? If things cannot happen, then you have no story. Anyway, it's human nature to change, even if for the worse. Otherwise people die of boredom. If you start out perfect, there is nowhere to go but down." "Besides which, of course," added Davies, "you risk turning into Stalin. A perfect society requires perfect people. The People are always a terrible disappointment. Not up to it, you know. Damned nuisance, they are. No wonder rulers go mad and turn nasty. You have no doubt read as many Utopias as I have. How many would you want to live in?" "True. Anterwold will be a framework for a better society, not a perfect one, which is obviously impossible. Still, I will need your help, my friends. I will, over the next few weeks, bring you the basic outlines of my world. You will tell me whether or not you think it might work. I will modify them until it becomes strong, stable, and capable of dealing with the feeble creatures that are men without collapsing into a nightmare as bad as the one we already have." He smiled. "In return, I will listen to you again. Persimmon"--­he looked at the man on his left who had not yet ­spoken--­"I hope you are driving a coach and horses through the laws of physics? If you would care to remove that look of disapproval at my escapist frivolity, perhaps you would like to tell us what you are doing?" ... I want a beautiful, open, empty landscape, bathed in sunlight, Lytten thought as he pedalled his old bike home a little later. Gentle rolling hills, green and dotted with sheep. The very ideal of paradise. At least for an En­glish reader. Mountains always contain evil. They are where people die, or are attacked by wild animals or wild people. We think of mountains as beautiful, but then we can rush through them on a warm train. Our attitude would be different if we had to walk up and down them, buffeted by rain or snow. It is easy to imagine a world where not only can few people read, few need to or want to. Serious reading can become the preserve of a small group of specialists, just as ­shoe-­making or farming is for us. Think how much time would be saved. We send children to school and they spend most of their time learning to read and then, when they leave, they never pick up another book for the rest of their lives. Reading is only important if there is something worthwhile to read. Most of it is ephemeral. That means an oral culture of tales told and remembered. People can be immensely sophisticated in thought and understanding without much writing. Such were Lytten's thoughts as he made his way up the road back to his house. There was bread and cheese in the kitchen; he'd put the kettle on the hob to boil up some water for tea, put coke on the fire and soon enough his study would be warm. No one would disturb him. The doorbell rang rarely; only the ­tradesmen--­the groceries being delivered, the coal man once a month, the laundry man to bring back a sack of damp ­washing--­disturbed his peace, and they were all dealt with by Mrs. Morris, who came in three mornings a week to look after him. Most evenings he ate in college, then came home to read or settle down with a record on his extremely expensive record player. An indulgence, but he had always adored ­music--­which is why his imaginary world would place a high value on song. He felt genuinely affectionate towards many, but needed few. Take Rosie, the girl who fed his cat, for example. Either she had adopted him, or he had adopted her. Or perhaps the cat had been the matchmaker. She came, and often enough they had long chats. He liked her company, found her views and opinions stimulating, for he had no experience of young girls, especially not those of the most recent vintage. The young were very different these days. Flatteringly, Rosie seemed to like him as well and their conversations would start off on some perfectly ordinary subject, then meander into music, or books, or politics. Much more interesting an individual than most of his students or colleagues. She was insatiably curious about everything. Excerpted from Arcadia by Iain Pears All rights reserved by the original copyright owners. Excerpts are provided for display purposes only and may not be reproduced, reprinted or distributed without the written permission of the publisher.