Title: An Instance of the Fingerpost
Author: Pears, Iain
Published by: Vintage
Year: 1998
First published: Jonathan Cape, 1997
Date reviewed: 02.17
ISBN: 9780099751816

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.