Oh also, people did not write stuff like this in the 17th century, not even slightly. This is a wildly unrealistic smoothed down scrubbed and washed version of something no 17th century person would ever have written. It was interesting to learn towards the end that Prestcott was in Bedlam, which casts additional doubt over his narrative, but I didn't find his section very compelling, and Wallis's even less so. Well he was against slavery, but if the crusty bastard who captains the vessel is willing to hold prayer meetings with them all across the ocean than he was in. It is so nice to turn a healthy profit and save souls at the same time. We are supposed to believe this investment is about souls and not about gold.

An Instance of the Reading the Detectives - Buddy reads: An Instance of the

Olivier is purportedly a great poet, but the only fragments of his verse we encounter are '(in the wholly inadequate 1865 translation of Frédéric Mistral) "My eyes have stabbed my soul..." ' This is more than inadequate, it is an appalling cop-out. Manlius's classical wit is marked with a similar ellipsis: 'They swapped aphorisms about water, played with quotations from Pliny about his garden...' What aphorisms? Which quotations? And Julien's great intellect is evident only in his knowing silences.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 year was 1663. An English king had freshly mounted the throne; civil war hardly a memory behind him. Political intrigue and religious strife swept across the land, sending a rogue but heady breeze through the university town of Oxford. Four men are called upon to recollect the events of those days - a gentleman of Venice, a student, a cryptographer and an archivist. Each account builds upon the one that went before, challenging the truth and ever-complicating the circumstances surrounding the death of a low-born woman with a treasonous past. None of them is reliable in their recounting of the events. These men aren’t Adson von Melk or Matthew Shardlake. Set largely in Oxford, the main fascination and brilliance of the novel is its supremely confident structure and plot. The book is actually a single story told four times, by four different narrators. Each of them has their own reasons for not telling the truth: they have a desire to obscure or hide from their actions; their perception is coloured by religious or political preconceptions; or they are — quite simply — mad. The end result is that you simply don’t know the real nature of the plot’s events once you have finished. My Girl Is Not a Slut: All of the narrators have pretty unenlightened attitudes towards Sarah because they think she is promiscuous

Reading guide for An Instance of the Fingerpost by Iain Pears

Yes, seems to be a Marmite book as I'm the same as Jill on this one, and also struggled with Pears' The Portrait.Our first narrator is Marco da Cola, a rather flamboyantly dressed young man from Venice who is in London on business for his father. He is having pecuniary difficulties and needs sources of ready cash. He turns his hand to being a physician, untrained, but it seems that in this time period men with a degree in most anything would occasionally turn their hand to doctoring. The descriptions of the superstitions that were still dictating prescribed treatment by a physician of this time period made it very clear that one had to be very desperate to seek care at all. Da Cola meets Sarah Blundy when he offers to help heal her mother’s broken leg. He needs a client even if it is unlikely that Sarah can pay his fee with hard coin. There is something, though, not quite right about Marco da Cola. Messianic Archetype: According to Wood's interpretation of the events, Sarah Blundy is a reincarnation of Jesus. Born in 1955, Iain Pears has worked as an art historian, a television consultant, and a journalist, in England, France, Italy, and the United States. He is the author of six highly praised detective novels, a book of art history, and countless articles on artistic, financial, and historical subjects. He lives in Oxford, England. likes his plots as baroque and ingenious as possible, ''An Instance of the Fingerpost'' will not disappoint.