They are united in their struggles between the notion of civilisation and empire, and by their pondering of the relationship between intellect and action. These characters, centuries apart, are linked by this tract, by their love, by their own sense of beauty and intellect and by their place in a pivotal historical context. Later Julian comes upon it in the Vatican Library, and spends many years working on the tract, and retranslating it in conjunction with his knowledge of Olivier’s poetry and life. Later Manlius writes his own version, which is found by Olivier in a monastery. There are also heavy threads of classical philosophy underpinning the stories, primarily The Dream of Scipio, originally a neo-Platonic tract written by Cicero, which concerns a dream in which the character Scipio is told about the nature of the soul, the responsibility of man on earth, and the temporal nature of life on earth. Each of these men are shaped and impacted upon by their great loves, and the philosophical conundrum at the heart of their stories. Woven amidst the history, are the characters’ personal stories, and in particular, the love stories of the three main characters, Manlius Hippomanes, Olivier de Noyen and Julien Barneuve.

All of the eras are traced from the same location, primarily in Avignon, France, where the papacy was located during the 14th c, and which was occupied by Germany during the Second World War. It is part historical fiction, spanning 3 linked, but very different eras: the end of the Roman Empire in the 5th Century, the rise and collapse of the Roman papacy in the 14th century during the time when the Bubonic Plague was at its worst and the end of World War Two in the 20th Century. Iain Pears’ second serious work of literary fiction The Dream of Scipio is, like his previous bestseller, An Instance of the Fingerpost the sort of book that defies categorisation. We are given a godlike gift of being able to watch the movement of historically cyclically rather than in a linear fashion, and to be able to identify with the difficulties faced by the characters. The links between the three stories are handled well, and it is very interesting to watch a similar drama simultaneously playing itself out in very different contexts, albeit on the same ground. Pears is a powerful historian and his research is impeccable.

An instance of the fingerpost review