While Pears’ ‘An Instance of the Fingerpost’ (published 1997) tells its story through the voices of four people and is set in one time period, ‘The Dream of Scipio’ (published 2002) and his ‘Stone’s Fall’ (published 2009) combine multiple protagonists over different time periods.

All three periods in ‘Scipio’ are set mainly in Provence, in and around the towns of Vaison and Avignon. In the 5th century the Roman Empire was coming to an end, its power and influence waning rapidly without the resources to maintain control over its territories. The Christian Church was building its own power.

In the 14th century, Avignon was the seat of the Catholic Pope Clement VI. Bishops and cardinals contended for personal power; heresies challenged the Church’s teachings.

The 20th century saw the rise of fascism, the outbreak of war and the German occupation.

These periods are linked in the book by three characters, each with an interest in Cicero’s ‘Somnium Scipionis’ (‘Dream of Scipio’). In the 5th century Manlius, a Roman nobleman who is appointed Bishop of Vaison, writes a commentary on Cicero’s text. In 14th century Avignon a young scholar, Olivier de Noyen, is obsessed by Manlius’s work and other old manuscripts, and in the 20th century a student, Julien Barneuve, is in turn researching the life of the 14th century scholar.

Other threads link the three periods. In the Roman period Sophia, a female philosopher originally from Alexandria, has a strong influence on Manlius. Her Neo-Platonic ideas challenge the conventional teachings of the early Christian church. By the middle ages she has become Saint Sophia with a chapel outside Vaison dedicated to her. Olivier de Noyen knows the chapel well: a close friend paints a fresco in the chapel. Olivier himself is obsessed with Rebecca, the servant of Gersonides, a Jewish Neo-Platonist who challenges his thinking. Julien Barneuve has an enduring relationship with a strong and independent Jewish female artist (painter) who similarly challenges his view of the world and who for a time lives as a semi-recluse in St Sophia’s chapel.

And in each period the characters’ world faces a challenge – attacks on the rule of Rome by the Burgundians and the Goths; the Black Death; the rise of Fascism, the second world war and the German occupation of France.

Several of the characters are genuinely historic: the Jewish philosopher Gersonides, Pope Clement VI and the Burgundian King Gundobad for example. Others have close historical parallels – Pears’ Manlius is a close match to the 5th century Neo-Platonist Macrobius. The Wikipedia article about the book has more information on this aspect.

What of the book itself? For me it was a tough one to read, at least to start with. The first and easily the longest of its three parts I found particularly dense. Pears skips rapidly from one period to another in a succession of short episodes, demanding a lot from the reader to follow each thread and understand what’s going on. By half-way through (and still in Part 1) I wasn’t sure I would be able to finish. But when I finally reached Part 2 the episodes lengthened, the pace quickened: it became clear that there was a story to be told about each of the characters. And in Part 3 events in each period come to a climax. Some of the action is violent.

So this is a book that is gruelling, fascinating and astonishing. You could say it’s about Neo-Platonism and the battle of ideas. It’s about antisemitism. It’s about what it means to be a ‘civilised society’. But I ultimately see it as about power; how it is sought and wielded by the powerful and how it affects those who suffer under it. It implies that the actions of individuals, sometimes powerful, sometimes close to power but not themselves powerful, can lead to events that determine the course of history.

In summary, if you decide to read the book be prepared to settle in for the long haul. I wouldn’t say I enjoyed it at the time but I felt it was a challenge, and in retrospect I’m glad to have read it. It’s an impressive achievement by the author, and I’ve learned some history along the way.

Set in the time of the Great Depression in 1930s America this book tells the story of the Dunne family and their neighbours. They, like many others, had been tempted to move west to farm in Oklahoma only to struggle and eventually be brought to despair by the dust storms caused in large part by the farming methods they themselves adopted. You think you’ve read this story before? You’re probably right; it’s also the plot of John Steinbeck’s great novel ‘The Grapes of Wrath’. But more on that later.

The Dunnes’ story unfolds in two parts; the first set in Oklahoma, the second in California as the Dunnes and others abandon their farms and move west in the hope of being able to make a living. Throughout, the characters are written with care and compassion. They are supportive towards each other and act with dignity even as they despair over their struggles with the weather, unreliable harvests, increasing debt and banks foreclosing on their land and property. Through all this they are trying to live normal lives: young couples fall in love and wonder how they might be able to set up home together; parents want their children to go to school; old people worry about the futures of their children and grandchildren.

And then come the dust storms. The fine dust and sand fills everything, filtering into barns, houses and lungs, covering and suffocating new crops, killing animals and people. Babb’s description is powerful and harrowing, telling the full horror of what the community had to endure.

Inevitably the time comes when they have to abandon their farm and head west. In the second part of the book they join thousands like themselves working as itinerant crop-pickers in California, moving north and south with the seasons. Treated hardly better than slave labour they are ruthlessly exploited by the big corporations who control agricultural business in the state. Unions try to organise and fight for better conditions but face strong and often violent opposition.

At the end of the book there is no resolution, no happy ending. The story has been told. Some have survived, others have not. Life goes on.

So who is Sanora Babb, and why did she write a different Grapes of Wrath? You might do well to turn the question round and ask why Steinbeck wrote a different version of Babb’s story.

Babb was born in Oklahoma in 1907 grew up as a child in Oklahoma and eastern Colorado in a farming family that faced the struggles about which she writes. Graduating from high school she was able to find work, eventually as a newspaper and magazine reporter and as a teacher in a rural school. She moved to Los Angeles in 1929 to join Associated Press as a reporter just in time for the stock market crash.

For almost the next ten years she made what living she could writing articles and stories for a variety of magazines, papers and journals. Then, quoting from the foreword to the book*,

… in 1938 she went to work as a volunteer for the Farm Security Administration … helping organise camps for the dispossessed farmers. … she kept a diary of her experiences and began a manuscript of her first novel. … Tom Collins, the founding manager of the Weedpatch migrant labour camp in Arvin … asked her to keep notes and later … [requested] a copy of them for another writer who was visiting the camp to research a novel. That writer was John Steinbeck, whom Babb reports she met twice.

No prizes for guessing what happened next. Babb sent four chapters of her her novel to Random House in New York who accepted it for publication and invited her to New York to finish it, which she did. But before it could be published, ‘The Grapes of Wrath’ was released and sold 430,000 copies in its first five months. Random House understandably and regrettably decided that given the success of ‘Grapes’ there was no room for another book on the same subject and abandoned publication.

In the foreword to the book and the publicity blurbs on the cover Babb and the publishers are careful not to accuse Steinbeck of plagiarism, so what Babb might think privately we do not know. Neither, I believe, does Steinbeck acknowledge Babb as a source. It’s so long ago that I read Steinbeck that I can’t say whether ‘Unknown’ is a better book on its subject than ‘Grapes’, but it has made a strong impression on me and I suspect that if I re-read Steinbeck I would find Babb’s account more empathetic and be inclined to say it is the better of the two.

* I have anglicised the spelling

These are the first three of a six book series of mystery thrillers set in the late 16th century. Elizabeth I is Queen of England, Henry VIII’s break with Rome and the dissolution of the monasteries is still a recent memory and Catholic plots against Elizabeth, real or imagined, abound.

The main protagonist and first-person narrator is one Giordano Bruno, an ex-Dominican monk from Naples who fled from his monastery to escape the Inquisition; he had been found reading a forbidden book in the monastery’s privy. Bruno ends up in England and thanks to his friendship with Sir Philip Sydney, whom he had met in Padua a few years earlier, and the patronage of the King of France whom he had tutored in philosophy, he is drawn into the circle of Elizabeth’s spymaster Francis Walsingham. The stories flow from this setting.

I read the books in the wrong order, picking up a paperback version of the third book, ‘Sacrilege’, and reading it almost in one sitting. I quickly downloaded ‘Heresy’ and ‘Prophecy’ on Kindle and binge-read them. In chronological order they are set in Oxford, London and Canterbury. In each, Bruno is instrumental in uncovering the perpetrators of a series of murders. I found them gripping and compelling, totally convincing in their depiction of both the historic physical world and the thoughts and ideas of the time. There’s action and excitement too.

But I was taken by surprise while reading ‘Sacrilege’ (the first I read). In the story Bruno is desperate to track down a book he had once seen, written by “Hermes Trismegistus”. After the third or fourth mention of this book I thought it was such a strange name I looked it up – and discovered Hermes was at the time said to be the author of a series of ancient mystical texts (according to Wikipedia now thought to be written by a number of Greek writers in the second or third century AD). From there I discovered that Giordano Bruno himself is a real historical character whose life story is the back story to the books, and who even today is known as an enlightened free-thinker. I haven’t checked, but I’m confident that many of the other characters in the books are also historical, though their actions may not always be; these books are fiction after all!

I shall read the other three before too long, though knowing now how the historic Giordano Bruno died I’m not sure I want to read the last one!

An excellent story in the form of a political crime thriller set in the foothills of Pyrenean Spain towards the end of the 16th century. Carr captures the paranoia of the times with the secular state and the Inquisition both trying to uncover real and imagined sedition against the beleaguered Spanish crown. The central characters are well-drawn, and the wealth of historical detail means the story is completely credible. It moves along at a good pace, and although the book is quite long (about 450 pages) it holds the reader’s attention right to the end.

Like Iain Pears’ ‘Stone’s Fall‘, ‘An Instance of the Fingerpost’ has greed, espionage, love, lust, betrayal, duplicity and murder. And like Stone’s Fall it is told in different voices, four this time. Its setting is Oxford in the early 1660s, around the time of the restoration of the monarchy after the civil war.

The events at the heart of the story are the death of a Fellow of New College and the conviction and execution of a young woman for his murder. Around this simple thread Pears builds a complex net of lies and deceit where no-one is quite what they claim to be. He uses contemporary sources to weave fact and fiction and must have done an astonishing amount of research to get inside the head of each of his four very different narrators. Pears captures the infighting and jockeying for position and favours in academia, the church and in the new king’s court, and the deep mistrust between Protestants and Catholics. The time is also the dawn of the Enlightenment; the beginning of scientific investigation and the conflict between the new experimentalism and established religion and scholasticism play their part in the story.

Many of the characters are historic; there’s a dramatis personae at the end but it’s probably best to leave it until you’ve finished the book before you check. ‘Fingerpost’ is an amazing achievement: it’s compelling, authentic, and intriguing. And just when you think at last that the mysteries are clear and the rather dull historian who is the fourth voice has had his say, there is a satisfying final twist to the story to keep you turning the last pages.

Another excellent work by Robert Harris. He has written a fully-researched but fictionalised account of the “Dreyfus affair” which split French society around the turn of the 19th and 20th centuries. In his introduction Harris writes: “None of the characters in the pages that follow, not even the most minor, is wholly fictional, and almost all of what occurs, at least in some form, actually happened in real life.”

In the paranoia in France that followed that country’s defeat by Germany in 1870 and the loss of Alsace-Lorraine, one of the most infamous miscarriages of justice saw Captain Alfred Dreyfus courtmarshalled for espionage and sentenced to exile on Devil’s Island, where he suffered for years in solitary captivity, shackled and denied any contact with the outside world — or even his gaolers.

The story is told in the first person by Major Georges Picquart. Picquart was involved on the fringes of the original investigation and courtmarshal, and was then appointed Head of the army’s counter-espionage section. Here he came to realise that Dreyfus was innocent and the real traitor was still free. His efforts to re-open the case were blocked at every turn, and he found that the French establishment would rather mount a huge conspiracy of lies and deceit than admit their mistake, free Dreyfus and convict the guilty man. The conspiracy involved the very highest people in the military and government. The thread of anti-Semitism (Dreyfus was Jewish) runs through the story and colours the attitudes of the key players and the public.

In case you don’t know the story well enough to recall how l’affaire Dreyfus ended I won’t spoil it, but I’m sure you’ll be keen to follow it to its conclusion.

As my recent experience of prize-winning books has been a bit mixed I’m glad to say that I enjoyed this 2011 Costa Book of the Year. Set in late 18th century Paris it tells the story of a young engineer hired to clear away an ancient burial ground and its neighbouring church. A small cast of principal characters is drawn well and the story kept me intrigued throughout. How accurate the picture of mostly working-class life in Paris at the time may be I’m not qualified to judge but it certainly convinced me!

Conclusion: Worth the effort.