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Sarah, because she had worked for Dr. Grove, and was known as a willful woman, meaning she was likely to defend herself verbally if assaulted verbally, is the most convenient number one suspect in the poisoning of the Dr. Grove. Iain Pears was recommended to me by a highly intelligent academic I know, someone whose opinion I respect when it comes to the intellectual. So I guess it fits that I find his books to be high quality fiction that's excellent and sometimes just a little above my head.
Sarah is the most complex character, strong and willful -- and with a reputation -- and surprisingly forthright; Pears asks a lot of the character, and makes it a bit hard on her in her only being seen through the eyes of the four narrators (and the gossip they hear) -- their attitudes ranging from heartlessly (ab)using her and spreading cruel false rumors about her to almost complete devotion.
Reader Reviews
the humanity of at least one of the narrators and it is she who saves the novel from a certain dryness. There is a murder and there is a dispossessed heir. Frankly, I couldn’t give a stuff if some shouldabeen rich young sprog got hornswoggled in the 17th century, I mean, the goodly realm of Great Britain had just been through 20 years of civil war and there was an awful lot of horns swoggled, of that you can be sure. I’d say more horns were swoggled than not swoggled. Vast estates yanked from under the noses of their rightful heirs and all of that. Who cares. The term "fingerpost" is also an obscure synonym for prelate or priest, foreshadowing one of the book's main plot points. [3] are the stuff of publishers' dreams, and in Pears's novel they may have found a near-perfect example of the genre. It is literary -- if that means intelligent and well written -- and for the reader who likes to be teased, who Oliver Cromwell is dead; the Levellers, Diggers and other such factions -- with their wild dreams of an egalitarian society -- have been destroyed or dispersed; peace, finally, has returned to a ravaged land . . . or has it?
Plea Bargain: The guilty plea earns a 'merciful' death by hanging, before being burned (in contrast to just the latter). he world of Iain Pears's new novel is the muddy, war-battered England of the 17th century. The civil war is over; one king has lost his head, another is newly restored Forget about solving all these crimes; the signal triumph here is (spoiler) the heroine’s survival. Hidden papers and codes also figure prominently in the story -- which itself of course also begs to be decoded, but only can be when the final pieces fall into place. Literary Allusion Title: The title, as well as short epigraphs for each part of the narration, is taken from Francis Bacon's Novum Organum Scientarum.
The novel is self-consciously learned and serious, yet there are moments of sly humour. While many passages might have been lifted from obscure theological treatises, light relief is offered by what could easily have come from yesterday's Daily Mail. With pedant-defying scholarship it bludgeons the reader into accepting its authenticity by the very weight of historical detail. (...) This combination of erudition with ingenuity makes for satisfying reading." - Robert Mighall, Independent on Sunday Kad vis kitose dalyse sutinkame tuos pačius personažus ir jie atsiskleidžia vis kitu aspektu, vis su kitais ar papildomais bruožais. Ir tai nėra simple atskleidinėjimas, kai pasirodo, jog mus apgaudinėjo kurio nors veikėjo perspektyva (kaip Fates and Furies), bet natūralus, žmogiškas daugiabriauniškumas. Galiausiai jautiesi prie tų personažų labiau priartėjusi (net prie nemaloniųjų), o ne jais pasibaisėjusi. Cola's rather straightforward account, by an outsider briefly among a community and in a nation in considerable turmoil which he would seem to have nothing to do with and little more than visiting interest in (beyond that rather hopeless-sounding business situation in London, which indeed he can do little about) seems, on its plain face, to be trustworthy enough.
Although the book's mystery begins as a classic whodunnit surrounding the death of an Oxford Don, it soon becomes apparent that the real mystery surrounds the nature of discovery, investigation, understanding and ultimately truth itself. The title is a quotation borrowed from the 17th century philosopher Francis Bacon, who in his Novum Organum wrote about the nature of reasoning and the fallibility of evidence, but accounted for instances of the fingerpost - crucial instances which pointed in only one direction, sure and indissoluble, allowing for no other possibility. Such is the case with the book - although I felt a little disappointed by the ending: I felt that the introduction of a supernatural theme was unnecessary - it looked like Pears wrote himself into a corner, and had to resort to the supernatural to solve the plot and tie all its ends. Although to his credit we have to take into account that even the supernatural event is narrated by one of the characters, who has his own bias and perhaps is telling us what he wished had happened instead of what has actually taken place.
The victim is Dr. Robert Grove, an amateur astrologer of New College, Oxford. Like many men, then and now, he liked a glass of alcoholic liquor at the end of the day to calm his frazzled nerves and hopefully give him a gentle push off into the land of Morpheus. Unfortunately with the brandy was a tincture of arsenic that seized his heart and left him a cooling, yet still flatulent, corpse with a host of suspects. The murder of Dr. Robert Grove -- an Oxford Fellow, and an historical figure (as are quite a few of the characters in the novel) -- is the central plot point, though the story ranges far beyond that. Is Wood the real lunatic thinking he'd slipped his dream girl from a noose and saved her only to have her evaporate (please!) ?
Readers will get a feel for the practice of medicine, justice, science, alchemy, and the difficulty of life for those not fortunate to be well born. It’s England in the 1660s, Charles II has been restored to the throne following years of civil war and Oliver Cromwell’s short-lived republic. Oxford is the intellectual seat of the country, a place of great scientific, religious, and political ferment. A fellow of New College is found dead in suspicious circumstances. A young woman is accused of his murder. I may, after I recover from reading this a first time, read it again, just to see if I'm totally off base. There must be something I'm missing.
Book Summary
Another sweltering month in Charlotte, another boatload of mysteries past and present for overworked, overstressed forensic anthropologist Temperance Brennan. The four parts of the novel are preceded by Epigraphs taken from Francis Bacon's Novum Organum. The first three quotations describe three of Bacon's four Idols of the mind. The fourth quotation is the source of the title. The quotation is much abbreviated, with no ellipses showing the omissions. The full text (using a slightly different translation of the book) is as follows:
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