There are many beautiful passages, certainly, but the central aspects of the book would have been better treated in a study of real writers than in this oddly fictionalised form of scholarship. In fact, there are more exciting PhD theses. The plot has more in common with an academic treatise than with a thriller. The breathless thrills of An Instance of the Fingerpost have been exchanged for a lengthy meditation on cultural history, with characters as pegs for thoughts.

There's a lot of movement, but very little progression. No single story provides the frame for the others, and we jump between historical moments every other paragraph.

This mysterious text links the three men, as does their love for a woman - Sophia, Rebecca, Julia - a kind of Universal Muse who wafts inspiringly through time. Our scholar-hero is Julien Barneuve, a 1930s French intellectual whose failure to intervene decisively in public life leads him into the service of the Vichy regime.īefore the war, he had unearthed an obscure Provençal poet of the fourteenth century, Olivier de Noyen, and a philosophical manuscript, 'The Dream of Scipio', written by a fifth-century Roman aristocrat, Manlius Hippomanes. The action - what there is of it - in The Dream of Scipio moves between 5th-, 14th- and 20th-century Avignon. But, on the evidence of the new novel, it looks as if An Instance of the Fingerpost may have been a one-off. The bestselling An Instance of the Fingerpost (1997) marked a new departure for Pears far more structurally and stylistically ambitious than the Italian series, it suggested that he was developing his voice as a serious novelist, as did his move from HarperCollins to Cape. His Italian art-world romps have titles like The Bernini Bust and The Raphael Affair: they're light and ingenious and they sell well and their success has encouraged him to move ever further into the mainstream. Iain Pears, like Stewart, is a respected academic, the author of a monograph on eighteenth-century collectors, but he's not too proud to publish crime novels under his own name.

An instance of the fingerpost