Arcadia: A novel

Category: Livres anglais et trangers,Literature & Fiction,Genre Fiction

Arcadia: A novel Details

From the author of the international best seller An Instance of the Fingerpost, Arcadia is an astonishing work of imagination. Three interlocking worlds. Four people looking for answers. But who controls the future—or the past? In 1960s Oxford, Professor Henry Lytten is attempting to write a fantasy novel that forgoes the magic of his predecessors, J. R. R. Tolkien and C. S. Lewis. He finds an unlikely confidante in his quick-witted, inquisitive young neighbor Rosie. One day, while chasing Lytten’s cat, Rosie encounters a doorway in his cellar. She steps through and finds herself in an idyllic, pastoral land where Storytellers are revered above all others. There she meets a young man who is about to embark on a quest of his own—and may be the one chance Rosie has of returning home. These breathtaking adventures ultimately intertwine with the story of an eccentric psychomathematician whose breakthrough discovery will affect all of these different lives and worlds.  Dazzlingly inventive and deeply satisfying, Arcadia tests the boundaries of storytelling and asks: If the past can change the future, then might the future also indelibly alter the past?

[button]

Reviews

I am fairly disappointed by this book, the more because Pears An Instance at the Fingerpost is a superb book, one of my favourites!, with a complexity of threads and levels, while maintaining a coherence of the plot that makes the final revelation a masterpiece. The Dream of Scipio also covers several historical periods of France Provence with a satisfactory plot and deep enough background (fed by a deep knowledge of the area and the eras). The background, the broader perspective, the deep humanity of the characters, all these qualities of Pears books are lost in Arcadia, which sums up as an accumulation of clichs on dystopias, time-travel, and late 1950s Oxford academics. [Warning, spoilers ahoy!] The parallel (and broadly medieval) universe to which the 20th century characters time-travel has some justifications for being a new type of Flatland: it is the creation of a single Oxonian academic, a mix of J.R. Tolkien and Eric Ambler. But these 20th century characters are equally charicaturesque. And so are the oppressors and the rebels in the distant future. (Set on the Isle of Mull, of all places!) And the mathematics of the time-travel apparatus are carefully kept hidden (with the vague psychomathematics alluded there reminding me in negative of the carefully constructed Asimovs psychohistory.)There is a point after which pastiches get stale and unattractive. And boring. (That the book came to be shortlisted for the Arthur C. Clarke award this year is a mystery.)

[button]