Iain Pears: The Dream of Scipio

By PENELOPE BIEDER

The central idea of this novel is good. Take three men, all living in the same part of Provence, but at vastly different times.

In the fifth century, Manlius Hippomanes of the Gallic gentry is hellbent on saving the crumbling civilisation that is the Roman Empire. Olivier de Noyen, a poet, is unlucky enough to be in Pope Clement's Avignon at the time of the Black Death in the 14th century. And Julien Barneuve is reluctantly drawn into the corrupt Vichy regime during World War II.

They all have graceful muses, in the form of the woman each man loves - Sophia, Rebecca and Julia - and they are all obsessed by a piece called The Dream of Scipio, a neo-platonic treatise written by Manlius and rediscovered in turn by Olivier and Julien. While the central, structural idea of this book is satisfying, its failure overall is that it is a novel of ideas and lacks movement or action forward or back.

Iain Pears is an academic who wrote a bestseller, his first novel, called An Instance of the Fingerpost, which was a clever story with Italian art history at its core. This new work, however, is rather disappointing.

Undoubtedly there is some beautiful writing as each man faces his own moral dilemma and his own mortality as he stares down the barbarian hordes, but a story will not work if it is strewn with ideas that suffocate the life out of the characters, and I think that is the problem here.

It is as if the author pokes about drily, summoning up first a semi-theological scenario, then a long and highly intellectualised debate, followed by an essay on self-doubt. The three men are puppets for his examinations of various philosophical arguments and we never even get to read either any of Olivier's poems or the major work, The Dream of Scipio, itself.

So it is hard to care too much what becomes of Manlius, Olivier and Julien, even though their fates are all too clearly signposted.

The meticulous historical research that anchors this book possibly would have been of more use in a work of non-fiction.

* Penelope Bieder is a freelance writer.

Random House

$34.95