Arcadia

December 14, 2015
Pears’s (An Instance of the Fingerpost) latest is a clever, well-constructed story. Living in an environmentally ravaged future governed by a technocratic so-called Scientific Government, the “psychomathematician” Angela Meerson builds a machine that could in theory access the resources of a parallel universe. However, the contraption turns out to be a good old-fashioned time machine that transports Meerson to pre-WWII Europe. Several decades later in 1960, she has built a new version of her machine in the cellar of the house of her lover, Henry Lytten, an Oxford literature scholar and intelligence agent who also dabbles in creative writing. Drawing heavily on the tropes of the Elizabethan pastoral and many other sources, Lytten has outlined a novel set in the fantasy realm of Anterworld. Anterworld is an oral culture whose priests are “Storytellers,” scholar-bards who roam the land and impart wisdom through sacred tales. Meerson uses Lytten’s sketchily conceived world to create a “latent” universe in her machine, a universe that gets activated, with unforeseen consequences, when a young girl named Rosie stumbles into the realm. Anterworld is meant to be derivative, borrowing from the long literary tradition of utopia and fantasy; this quality perhaps explains why although it gets the most attention of the novel’s three narratives, Anterworld is the least enchanting. Nonetheless, Pears excels at stage-managing the multiple sets as the actors leap from the dystopian future, to England in the grips of the Cold War, to whenever Anterworld could be said to exist, altering history as they go. A fun, immersive, genre-bending ride. 75,000-copy first printing.

December 1, 2015
Arcadia: a kind of heaven on Earth. Arcade: a place where games are played. Somewhere between the two lies this odd confection by the restless, genre-hopping Pears (Stone's Fall, 2009, etc.). It's the artist's pleasure to create. But what of the philosopher's? As Pears' latest opens, a younger Inkling--a member of the learned society to which C.S. Lewis and J.R.R. Tolkien belonged, that is--is deep in a project with countless implications. "I want to construct a society that works," says Henry Lytten. "With beliefs, laws, superstitions, customs. With an economy and politics. An entire sociology of the fantastic." Alas, the 1960s will seem a golden age when that sociology takes shape. One of many possible futures, the world of the 23rd century, would do a robber baron proud. Bad corporatista Zoffany Oldmanter is determined to corner the market on everything; says our shadowy narrator, determined to thwart a hostile takeover, his priorities under the circumstances are to preserve his property and "prevent the entire universe being reshaped in the image of a bunch of thugs and reduced to ruin." Good luck, though if the future baddies seem to have a head start on time travel, Lytten has a lock on the fantastic, to say nothing of a pergola portal into a medieval-tinged time in which 11-year-old Jay, having determined that Lytten's assistant, Rosie, is not a fairy, blossoms into manhood after staring "a spirit in the eye without flinching" and otherwise proving that wispy bookworms are not without inner resources. Within those three broad swaths of time lie many alternate futures, and Pears darts from one to the other to the point that the reader who isn't confused isn't quite getting what he's up to. Suffice it to say that there's plenty of metacommentary on the art of storytelling, science fiction (ahem: "We say speculative fiction"), the destruction wrought by greed, and other weighty matters. A head-scratcher but an ambitious pleasure. When puzzled, press on: Pears' yarn is worth the effort.

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June 1, 2016

Henry Lytten, a British professor and struggling writer, is trying to complete an epic fantasy novel that will compete with the works of J.R.R. Tolkien and C.S. Lewis. He bounces ideas off his young neighbor, Rosie, who inadvertently enters Lytten's magical Anterworld through a portal in his basement. A brilliant physicist and a respected scholar are just two of the other main characters-each chapter is told from 10 different points of view. While perplexing at times, the three settings (1960s England, Anterworld, and a dystopian island off the coast of Scotland) help keep the time travel/alternate history stories centered, and there is a satisfying conclusion. The author also created an app called Arcadia for iOS devices. It's free to download and explore, but finishing the novel costs $3.99. In the app, readers can choose how they want to read the novel-stories by character ("The Young Girl's Tale, "The Scientist's Tale," etc.) or by setting. VERDICT This is metafiction at its best, and teens who like complicated science fiction will appreciate the challenge.-Sarah Hill, Lake Land College, Mattoon, IL

Copyright 2016 School Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

Starred review from February 15, 2016
Pears seems to love three-part harmony, though time, not music, is his medium of choice. In Stone's Fall (2009) and The Dream of Scipio (2002), he weaved remarkably complex stories set in three different time periods that echoed one another, fugue-like, with interlocking themes. Here he ups the ante dramatically: there are three distinct time periods again, but they exist simultaneously, the linear notion of time having been replaced by an Einsteinian continuum. Prepare to experience a little narrative vertigo here, even in summary: one of these worlds is recognizable, 1960 Britain, where a tweedy Shakespeare professor and part-time spy, Henry Lytten, gathers with colleagues to spin tales of fantasy worldsthe pop novels they dream of writing; the second world is a dystopian future in which Angela Meerson, a maverick psychomathematician who harnesses emotions to power her calculations, has created a super-duper time machine; and, finally, there is Arcadia, called Anterworld, a universe that Meerson has created from Henry's notes describing his would-be fantasy novel.Dizzy yet? The spins are just beginning. Thanks to Meerson's machine, various characters, including a 15-year-old girl named Rosalind (Henry teaches Shakespeare, remember), jump from Cold War Britain to Anterworld, creating chaos in the process. If you think of what Stephen King did with time in 11/22/63 as being an undergraduate survey course in physics, then Pears' novel is the equivalent of Princeton's Institute for Advanced Study. It all starts with a problem common to every age: Meerson's machine attracts the attention of the politicos, who see it as a way of consolidating power, leaving the scientist no choice but to climb into the contraption herself and decamp for another time, hoping to prevent the entire universe from being reshaped in the image of a bunch of thugs and reduced to ruin. That's hard enough to do in our linear world, but when you throw Einstein into the mix, and tinkering with one moment in time affects all other moments, well, it's a hell of a lot trickier than rocket science.Yes, Pears handles his vertiginous narrative with remarkable legerdemain, but that's only one part of this novel's appeal. As the characters intermingle in multiple time frames, as Rosalind teaches the men of Anterworld a thing or two about women, as Angela learns that emotions power more than mathematics, as Henry discovers that characters in fiction can take on a life of their own through sheer force of personality, we are struck with the improbable ability of human beings to connect with one another, in the flesh and across time.Arcadia is a novel about the power of narrative, both to corrupt and to humanize. Like most great translit fictionDavid Mitchell's The Bone Clocks (2014), Haruki Murakami's 1Q84 (2011), and Nick Harkaway's Angelmaker (2012)Pears' genre-bending, time-collapsing tour-de-force dazzles us with world building, but, beyond that, it reminds us that the people in those worlds survive by their stories and by the way those stories reverberate backward and forward, achieving, if only now and again, the perfect harmony we all crave.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2016, American Library Association.)

Starred review from February 15, 2016

This complex, entertaining tale from British novelist Pears (An Instance of the Fingerpost) involves time travel, British spies betraying one another, and apocalyptic scenarios all folded together in a number of interconnected story lines. Closest to our times is Henry Lytten, an old Oxford scholar, amateur author, and part-time spy for the British government. Unbeknownst to him, his friend Angela Meerson is really a psychomathematician who has invented a time machine of sorts and has traveled to Henry's time, roughly the 1960s, to escape betrayal and maybe death many years in the future. With her invention, she has created another universe called Anterwold, drawing on ideas from a novel Henry is writing. A young girl who lives near Henry and sometimes feeds his cat has accidentally stepped into this world and has started up the machinations of several plots and love affairs. Angela is being hunted on many fronts, in many parallel universes, and the powerful leader from her time is anxious to get his hands on her machine to use for his own ends. VERDICT Pears weaves a diverse group of characters and multiple worlds from the idyllic to the Orwellian to create an impressive and quite enjoyable mystery fantasy. [See Prepub Alert, 8/24/15.]--James Coan, SUNY at Oneonta Lib.

Copyright 2016 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

September 15, 2015

This new work from Pears (An Instance of the Fingerpost) is so puzzle-box fascinating that he's designed an app to help readers sort out the ten story lines. These plots enfold four characters: Sixties Oxford don Henry Lytten; whip-smart 15-year-old Rosie Wilson, who feeds Henry's cat; Angela Meerson, a psychomathematician centuries hence who's playing with a powerful new machine; and scholar's apprentice Jay. Are you thinking David Mitchell's The Bone Clocks? Me, too.

Copyright 2015 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

February 15, 2016

This complex, entertaining tale from British novelist Pears (An Instance of the Fingerpost) involves time travel, British spies betraying one another, and apocalyptic scenarios all folded together in a number of interconnected story lines. Closest to our times is Henry Lytten, an old Oxford scholar, amateur author, and part-time spy for the British government. Unbeknownst to him, his friend Angela Meerson is really a psychomathematician who has invented a time machine of sorts and has traveled to Henry's time, roughly the 1960s, to escape betrayal and maybe death many years in the future. With her invention, she has created another universe called Anterwold, drawing on ideas from a novel Henry is writing. A young girl who lives near Henry and sometimes feeds his cat has accidentally stepped into this world and has started up the machinations of several plots and love affairs. Angela is being hunted on many fronts, in many parallel universes, and the powerful leader from her time is anxious to get his hands on her machine to use for his own ends. VERDICT Pears weaves a diverse group of characters and multiple worlds from the idyllic to the Orwellian to create an impressive and quite enjoyable mystery fantasy. [See Prepub Alert, 8/24/15.]--James Coan, SUNY at Oneonta Lib.

Copyright 2016 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.