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Adult Books - Fiction - Crime Fiction - Mystery
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Stone’s Fall.
Pears, Iain (author).
May 2009. 880p. Spiegel & Grau, hardcover, $28.95 (9780385522847).
REVIEW.
First published May 1, 2009 (Booklist).
Pears’ triumphant return to broad-canvas historical mysteries will draw comparisons to his magisterial Instance of the Fingerpost (1998), but it is really more like his lesser-known but equally dazzling Dream of Scipio (2002). In that novel and in this one, Pears constructs an intricate three-part harmony, telling a complex story across three separate time periods, seeming to lose us occasionally in the chord changes but always resurrecting a theme at just the right moment to hold the whole piece together. The tale begins with a simple premise: Did London financier John Stone fall to his death accidentally, or was he murdered? To answer that question, however, requires far more than conventional sleuthing. Moving from London in 1909 to Paris in 1890 and then to Venice in 1867, Pears melds first-person narratives from a journalist hired to write Stone’s biography, from a banker turned spy who was involved in Stone’s life at several crucial junctures, and from Stone himself. The question of the man’s death is answered in the end, but by the time the answer comes, it is far less important than the context surrounding it. As David Liss, in A Conspiracy of Paper (2000), explored the beginnings of stock trading in the late eighteenth century, so Pears—moving ahead about a century—takes us deep inside the world of international finance at its infancy. Making sense of the byzantine ways in which money and politics commingle would seem more than enough for one novel, but Pears has much more on his plate: a look at the first great age of espionage, prior to World War I; a snapshot of how the twentieth-century arms race was born; and a mesmerizing portrait of nineteenth-century Venice. Does Pears attempt too much in this 880-page opus? Remarkably, no. It doesn’t just hang together loosely, in the sprawling manner of most multigenerational epics; rather, it seems welded in place, each part driving the next, almost like a fugue. Certainly, one of the best historical mysteries of the last several years.— Bill Ott
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