Review: Arcadia

Arcadia by Iain Pears
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

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.


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