Arcadia

A Novel

By: Iain Pears

Narrated by: John Lee, Jayne Entwistle

Length: 20 hrs and 12 mins

Publisher's summary

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?

©2016 Iain Pears (P)2016 Random House Audio

Critic reviews

“Every so often you read a novel to which the best critical response is simply ‘Wow!,’ followed by a sigh of pleasure. Eighteen years ago I felt this way about Iain Pears’s intricate historical mystery An Instance of the Fingerpost. The book dazzled for many of the usual reasons—fascinating characters, a richly presented fictive world, polished writing, lively dialogue, a serious engagement with ideas about life and morality—but, more unusually, it was also a masterpiece of plot construction. All this is again true, and then some, of Mr. Pears’s Arcadia. . . . ‘Qui moderatur tempus intelligit omnia,’ goes the Lytten family motto: ‘He who controls time understands everything.’ Doesn’t that actually describe the art of plot construction and its master, Iain Pears?” —Michael Dirda, The Wall Street Journal

“[Pears] is a master at creating structurally intricate novels. . . . As Pears steadily builds his multiplicity of stories, his orchestrations become something far more ambitious, a calculated and at times quite droll assault on the very nature of narrative itself.” —Steve Donoghue, The Washington Post

“Arcadia leads readers into an escalating series of interconnected textual worlds. . . . Pears is a great writer of ideas and intellectual adventure.” —The New York Times Book Review

Narnia, Shakespeare and a dystopian future

One of those books that grabs and doesn't let go. For anyone who loves fantasy and speculative fiction, and appreciates an intimately plotted story. Had me guessing until the very last minute. It's not straightforward and wouldn't suit someone who doesn't enjoy filling in the blanks the author intentionally leaves. I've listened to Audible for over 10 years and Arcadia is in my top 10.

Homage to early-mid 20th C Brit Genre Writing

An intellectual entertainment of the first order, this Escheresque puzzle piece devoted to British bucolic fantasy, science fiction dystopic fantasy, and WW2-early Cold War spy writing. All somewhat based on Shakespeare's mistaken identity comedic tropes. Delightful, if those sorts of things are your cup of afternoon tea.

Hard to follow

So many story paths, so many similar or exactly the same characters; it was very hard to follow. Throw on top of that time travel and possible other dimensions. I decide to look online for some kind of summary or whatever I might find to see if I was the one at fault. The author had an app created to help keep the story straight. With all of that, a few rewinds, I didn’t get the app; it is a good story. I think a little more explanation by a character or like a voice over once in a while might have helped. It is worth the read but be prepared. If it didn’t take some thought it wouldn’t have been worth reading … this pushes that theory.

An Escher Drawing of a Novel

This novel is the literary equivalent of the Escher drawing where two hands draw each other into existence. There are two central threads to most of this, one based in Tolkienesque fantasy and the other in late-1960s time travel sci-fi, and each constructs the other.

On the one “hand,” we have Henry Lytten, a tweedy British professor with a background in World War II espionage. He’s friends with Tolkien, C.S. Lewis, and the other Inklings, but he’s less ambitious. He wants to sketch a mild little fantasy world where, absent other structures of power and authority, Storytellers have deep temporal powers.

On the other, in a dystopian future where corporate chiefs have become the equivalent of fascist dictators, a rogue scientist named Angela Meerson has discovered a device that makes time travel possible. Her bosses don’t quite understand it – they think they are opening up windows to a parallel universe and don’t realize the decisions they make can affect their own timeline – but they’re planning to seize it anyway. She needs time to escape, so she ventures into the past. She lands in the 1930s, meets a young Lytten during the war, and slowly perfects her machine. To test it, she needs a template, an imaginary space she can open up without affecting other elements of time. She tries Tolkien’s Middle Earth, but there are logical inconsistencies – it depends upon the gods for its creation and maintenance, but the gods are not explained within it – so it collapses. She settles for Lytten’s smaller cosmos.

The result is that Lytten’s world becomes real.

In other words, we have a fantastic world that depends for its reality on the science of a later future, but that future depends for its self-understanding on the story-telling fantasy.

The overall concept is exceedingly clever. I nearly gave up on this after 30 or 40 pages because it was so full of familiar tropes. It felt almost cliched to see the old professor and the brilliant beautiful scientist and the little girl – Rosey/Rosalind – who gets pulled into the mix. It becomes more interesting and successful, though, as Pears’s ambition becomes more evident. He really is trying, Escher-style, to create a tangle of origins, to fuse these two different literary genres in a way that refuses precedence to either.

The only book I can think of that accomplishes anything so remarkable in terms of genre is Dune where Frank Herbert blends the two threads to create a space fantasy. (Stars Wars, of course, attempts the same thing, but it isn’t a book, and it’s at its best when it just lets the adventure run forward without pausing to explain its ideas. In fact, the more serious Star Wars asks us to take it, the less bearable it is.) That’s a very different experience in terms of tone and scope.

This book is not Dune, though. As much fun as it eventually becomes – and that’s a lot of fun – there are some clumsy technical aspects to it. The audiobook has two narrators, one for the Lytten thread and one for the Meerson, and that reflects the narrative challenge of telling the whole story from two different sides. Pears frequently resorts to the tired device of narrating one person’s view of an experience and then switching in the next chapter to another person in the scene giving us the other half of a conversation or encounter. That means some repetition, and it means some narrative condescension: it’s as if our narrator asks us to ‘hang on a moment’ while the author makes some changes to the scenery.

There’s also the problem of our getting new information at awkward times. It’s a great deal of fun to discover that minor characters introduced early on turn out to have connections to threads that get revealed to us later, but sometimes Pears can’t quite pull that move off with real deftness. Sometimes we simply get a new character introduced as consequential when it feels we should have known him or her more fully at an earlier stage. Some of that might be the product of a narrative that changes because its past changes, but other times it feels as if it’s Pears has reached the limits of his own story-telling capacity.

And, [SPOILER] there’s the somewhat jarring move in giving us two Roseys, of splitting her so that one remains in Anteworld and one returns to the 1960s. I kept expecting that to create the conditions for two distinct future worlds, but it seems simply an anomaly. It’s Pears ‘halving his cake’ and eating it too. It breaks the universal rules that he gives us, but then it doesn’t radically alter the future.

Those quibbles aside, the real fun of this is the way Lytten’s world begins to expand. Once Rosey accidentally stumbles into it, it begins to flesh out its own logical conditions. A reference to the nature of taxation in Lytten’s notes becomes the seeds for an entire economy. Individuals Lytten knew at one time or another become the basis for new characters, but those characters beget others as well. It feels like a literal realization of what authors do; the vision conjures the details, and the details drive the story that carries out and alters the vision.

We get, among other things, the fun of Rosey helping the members of the new world to understand English (they’re language has altered over time) and of reintroducing them to Shakespeare. With that, we have her enacting parts of Rosalind from As You Like It. So Shakespeare becomes – as the book’s title reinforces – one of the authors of the universe that Lytten and Meerson have set in motion.

There’s a lot more to tell, and part of the fun of reading this is to imagine the conversation you’d have with another reader. This is rich in details, seeming contradictions, and clever resolutions to those contradictions. It’s the kind of experience that gets better through sharing; Pears cleverness becomes all the more enjoyable when you can explain it in slow motion, when you can point to the ways he pulls off what he does.

[SPOILER] There is a cleverness to the final pages as well, when Meerson’s daughter turns out to have used the misunderstandings of the fascist bosses to help them wipe out their dystopia so that she and her renegade friends can replace them with a pastoral utopia. I saw that coming for a while, but I never quite believed Pears would do it. That is, this is such a gentle book – there’s only one killing through the entirety of it, and that’s a misunderstanding where a lifelong soldier gets to die a slow and honorable death – that it seems uncomfortable to make the happy ending dependent upon the nuclear holocaust that gets set in motion. That is, the ending fits the narrative structure, but not its tone.

In any case, this is certainly one to read if you have the time. It has its flaws, but those flaws are the result of remarkable ambition and nearly endless cleverness.

Good but a little slow

I liked the narrator. I liked the idea of the story. I almost gave up on it though because it was going so slow through the middle and it got a little boring. But I am glad I stuck it out since it ended well.

Fantastic book!

This book rather defies categorization: spy novel? Murder mystery? Steam punk? Historical fiction? Fantasy? Sci Fi? Brit Lit? Apocalyptic? Nuclear war? Shakespeare? Robin Hood? Time Machines and alternate universes?
Utterly and charmingly superb.

So MUCH Fun!!!!!

I had read "Instant of the Finger Post" a long time ago. And I have to say I really enjoyed this book so much more. After finishing all of Neil Gaiman and Chine Melville, I was looking for something new. This fit the bill.

Slow-moving Time-Travel Epic

PROS:
- I found the time-travel theoretical science pretty engaging. Essentially, the 'alternate realities' theory is shown to be false, and it turns out any given entry-point will affect all others. The paradox issue was still a bit of a problem for me, and it was a little tough to grasp at times, but I liked the analogy they used with a piece of paper and a string running over it. Provided the starting point ("the big bang") and the endpoint ("the big crunch," which really wasn't elaborated on...) are the same, the string can take any number of configurations along the way to those ends.
- The writing is great, and the character interactions are entertaining (and funny), in a 'British' flavor. Personally, I thought the narration was excellent. The two separate (male and female) narrators for the different chapters/character perspectives worked well.
- This novel incorporates a lot of different genre types, from medieval sword-and-shield to 60s spy novel, to dystopian future, and pulls it off pretty well. Things are tied together nicely at the end, which I liked.

CON:
- It was a little slow-moving at times. This novel was mainly character-driven, so if you are looking for action or thrills, this probably isn't the ticket.

A bit rambling, but final MANY Hours super fun!

Having read Mr. Pears before, I was prepared for huge amount of intricate setup in Arcadia. The only sad thing is that this story should be read and read to get squeeze everything from it, though the length may limit me to two reads only.
Great balancing act of time travel, alternate reality and multiple entertaining scenes in so many diverse spaces.
It would be either the greatest pleasure or the fiercest torture to observe and understand the author creating.

Read it (or listen to it!)

This was a wonderful story. The different narratives woven into one dance merrily from one genre to another across space and time. Is one of the best stories I’ve come across recently.