|
[ Home ]
[ About | Reviews | Search | Submit | Links | Miscellany ]
Iain Pears's extraordinary, dense, and engrossing account of the death and life of John Stone, First Baron Ravenscliff, begins forty-four years after he fell from his office window, leaving his beautiful widow, some thirty years his junior, and a will containing a large and mysterious bequest to his child, unnamed, of whom no one had ever heard. The occasion is the funeral of Elizabeth Robillard, formerly Lady Ravenscliff, and in attendance is Matthew Braddock, who had been retained, many years ago, to find the child.
We return quickly to 1909, the year of Stone's death. Braddock is offered the astounding sum of £350 a year plus expenses to undertake the investigation. The sum is dazzling, as it had to be, if Braddock is to overcome his suspicions and take on the job. As a crime reporter he is singularly unqualified for the assignment and lacks any familiarity with the world of business, but he is a fairly quick study and, if nothing else, dogged. And he falls increasingly under the spell of the lovely widow, despite the difference in their ages. Braddock uncovers a number of contradictions, anomalies, and downright lies, so many that by the end of the first section he has come to what he believes to be the answer to the puzzle of Stone's death. We are, however, only about a third of the way into the story.
The second section, told from the perspective of the 1940s in a memoir by one Henry Cort, one of the earliest of British professional espionage agents and close associate of Stone. But once again, we are pushed rapidly backward, this time to Paris, 1890, and the (actual) financial panic that brought Baring's bank to its knees (not for the last time) and revealed the tenuous underpinnings of international finance. This section is the heart of the book, not merely because it provides a wry comment on our present financial predicament, but also because it is here that we learn Elizabeth's history, and an extraordinary one it is, though one wholly of a piece with the times in which she finds herself. Finally in part three, John Stone speaks in his own voice, in a memoir written in 1890 but harking back to the beginnings of his own career in Venice, in 1867. What emerges is someone who sees himself as a man of high ethical standards but one who also believes that money is in itself pure. As he says somewhere, "money does not corrupt politics, politics corrupts money."
I've paid some attention to the dates, because Pears has set himself a remarkably difficult technical problem here and succeeded in handling it with complete sure-footedness. Not only are the dates a significant part of the puzzle, but the tactic of choosing to tell the story in reverse makes for further complications. Then there is the fact that each section is told by a different narrator and Pears has managed not only to differentiate their voices, but subtly to distinguish the idiom of the eras they describe. This is a textbook in how to write an historical novel that conveys what needs to be understood without those awkward pauses for a potted history lesson that turn so many readers off the genre.
In the end, though, what really distinguishes this book is the power of the characterization, especially of Elizabeth, almost mythic in her conception but also thoroughly grounded in both the era and the grand romantic fiction it produced. She is a character that lingers in the memory and whose mystery is never wholly unveiled.
In general, few crime novels can justify a length much in excess of three hundred pages. STONE'S FALL is twice that and still I am looking forward to reading it again quite soon. Pears has done what only the very best historical novelists can accomplish - he has presented us with a past as vivid as our present, peopled with characters that are thoroughly the products of the times in which they live but that still have an undeniable claim on our imagination. STONE'S FALL is as impressive as AN INSTANCE OF THE FINGERPOST and that is saying a very great deal.
Reviewed by Yvonne Klein, May 2009
[ Top ]
QUICK SEARCH:
Contact: Sharon Wheeler (shazwuk@reviewingtheevidence.com), Yvonne Klein (ymk@reviewingtheevidence.com)
[ About | Reviews | Search | Submit | Links | Miscellany ]
[ Home ]
|
