An Instance of the Fingerpost, Iain Pears (1998)

An Instance of the Fingerpost, Iain Pears (1998). It’s the early 1660s, and England is still recovering from two decades of civil war, dictatorship, and regicide. The monarchy has been restored with a new king, Charles II -- but only barely, as plenty of operatives from the Cromwellian regime are still around engaged in various machinations. Polarization and fanaticism are boiling over in both religion and politics; unsettling rumors, ambitious court intriguers, foreign spies and plotters are everywhere. And at the same time, scholars at Oxford University and the newly-formed Royal Society are building the early stages of scientific revolution, devising new experimental methods to study physics and anatomy while still holding on to older beliefs in astrology and alchemy.

This chaotic period of social and intellectual ferment -- “an age when the madness of conviction held all tightly in its grasp” (533) -- forms the background of Iain Pears’ historical murder mystery, An Instance of the Fingerpost, and furnishes much of its fascination and vibe. Like Umberto Eco’s 1980 The Name of the Rose, this novel combines a well-crafted murder mystery with some deep epistemological and philosophical history, and each side of that equation makes the other side better. There are numerous real-life figures among the book’s pages, from famous ones like Robert Boyle and John Locke to lesser-known characters like cryptographer John Wallis and Cromwell’s spymaster John Thurloe -- all of whom are not mere adornments, but crucially involved in the book’s convoluted plot.

That plot unfolds over 685 pages divided into four sections, each section featuring a different narrator. To say these narrators are “unreliable” would be like saying that Donald Trump occasionally stretches the truth a bit; it would be more accurate to say that they are misleading, deceptive, and deluded by turns. There’s a Rashomon-like quality to Pears’ book, as we see how the central events of the plot - as well as the social and cultural elements of the historical background -- are perceived and understood so differently by the four different narrators. As there should be with any good mystery, there’s a lot of fun for the reader in guessing towards a solution of the underlying mystery; in this case, though, there’s another layer of fun in guessing at the motivations and distortions of the respective narrators.

There’s a fair amount of potential confusion, too. A large cast of characters, some fictitious, some historical, engaged in a very complicated story involving multiple layers of rumor and deception, is a lot for any reader to keep straight. As I progressed through the book’s second half, I found myself often going back to the first half and re-reading sections, wishing I had remembered it better. Fortunately the book’s final section and narrator is very clear and helpful in recapping and illuminating the events and accounts of the previous three sections. I also found myself looking up a lot of Fingerpost’s historical figures, issues, and events on Wikipedia, which was time-consuming but also lent depth to the reading; there is a useful list of Dramatis Personae in the book, with brief capsule descriptions, but not being at all an expert on 17th century England, I found myself wanting to go deeper in many cases.

Again somewhat like The Name of the Rose, An Instance of the Fingerpost entertains the reader with its crafty plotting while also exploring issues of epistemology - what is truth, what is knowledge, and how do we know what we know? This is a big interest of mine as well, and obviously key to our present historical moment, as we live through this era of misinformation, bullshit, and propaganda, largely fueled by the Internet and social media; in this respect the 1660s were quite directly analogous to the 2020s. Different paths to knowledge contended messily with each other - experimentation? Logical induction? Divine revelation? - and a relatively new technology, print, was positively Internet-like in the way it challenged the traditional gatekeepers of knowledge and consensus. The Reformation, the scientific revolution, and the political upheavals of mid-17th century England were all, in a way, consequences of this epistemological ferment; and, as with our present era, there was a great deal of associated anxiety, confusion, and conflict. Pears conveys his characters’ collective predicament, caught up in the swirling maelstrom of an anxious age, very effectively, as they strive for certainty only to find it frustrating elusive, either learning to live with the chronic doubt that is a symptom of the modern condition, or succumbing to delusion that is largely self-induced.

We know now, of course, that England was in fact about to take off like a rocket to unexpected heights. The Glorious Revolution of 1688 would create a very durable political and dynastic settlement, and the Union of 1707 would unite England and Wales with Scotland and Ireland in the powerful new nation of Great Britain -- which would then spend the 18th and 19th centuries aggressively expanding to build the largest empire the world had ever seen. But Englishmen of the 1660s could not see this; their society seemed more on the verge of collapse than unprecedented prosperity and success. Their country was still considered a barbaric outland by Europeans, where Oxford scholars ate unseasoned meats with their bare hands at collective dining troughs, where poverty, violence and corruption were ubiquitous, and where bitter factionalism and division seemed to make any prospect of unity or stability unthinkable; “it was a mad time,” as one of Pears’ narrators recalls, “and the air was still filled with lunacies of all sorts” (620). And part of the appeal of any great historical novel, so well managed by Pears in this book, is illustrating and dramatizing this gap, between how we perceive a particular time-place in retrospect and how its denizens perceived it in their own time. It makes you think -- not only about the past, but about the present as well, and about how historical change works in the macro sense and in the lives of individuals.

Of course, every historical novel is also a compromise. The people of the past are different from us; they have different values, behaviors, ways of understanding and being in the world. Historians are fond of saying “the past is a foreign country” because their labors bring them face to face with the fundamental strangeness and unknowability of earlier eras. To truly show that strangeness would render any novel deeply inaccessible to most modern readers. And Pears manages this compromise quite well in An Instance of the Fingerpost; his characters speak in plain modern English, with only a slight gloss of early locutions; they have ideas, to be sure, that may strike modern readers as antiquated, but often accompanied by underlying values that are reassuringly familiar. In short, the past’s strangeness is offered up in moderate doses, the better to understand and grapple with it. The book is a wonderful imaginative gateway to thinking about historical questions; but it is very far from being, nor does it aspire to be, the last word on those questions.

What it does aspire to be is a truly compelling, entertaining, and stimulating historical mystery. The mystery elements are tight and satisfying, and I suppose you could read the book quite happily just focused on them alone. But going deeper, the reader can also dive into some truly fascinating historical and philosophical issues -- in ways that, to me at least, don’t take away from the entertainment but really enhance it. In brief, it’s entertaining and gripping while also making you think deeply -- as deeply as you want, I guess -- about some profound questions. That’s an impressive accomplishment for any fiction set in any time period.

Read late April 2025.