Today I finally finished Iain Pears' Dream of Scipio. It hasn't taken me this long to finish a book in quite some time, and I hate to admit that I'm a little glad it's over.
This is the book that one of my colleagues requires his sophomores in World History to read. Realizing that my knowledge of world history is slight, I decided to read it along with my kids. It's a novel that shows how the stories of three French men -- one living in the fifth century, one living in the fourteenth century, and one living in the 1940s -- are unbelievably intertwined, each dependent on the previous in some way. I learned a great deal about the Catholic Church and the Pope, as well as the Plague and how it affected Europe, and some details about France during WWII that I'd never known before. Overall, it was very educational, something I can easily imagine in a history course.
It was not, however, my type of literature. Educational, yes; captivating, hardly. The student who recommended it to me adored the book -- and even he said that it was a difficult story to "get into." (Side note -- that same student handed me the book and said, "I think you'll be able to understand it." I just smiled and said, "Yeah, I was an English major, remember?" I made no oral comparison of my reading level to that of many sophomores.) I thought three stories intertwined would be right up my alley, but I had a hard time connecting with the characters -- which is really very vital to my getting lost in a story -- until the last 75 pages or so of the 396 pages. (My kids kept telling me that if I could only make it to the last 100 pages, I'd be sucked in; I think I dug in my heels a bit and held out those extra 25 pages.) One reason I couldn't connect was because each story was told by a third person omniscient narrator instead of from each man's perspective. That overarching voice told me what was going on in each man's head, but that one voice is all I heard. I much prefer multiple voices, even when multiple perspectives really are included. I also felt distant because I simply didn't have time to connect with each character; the novel switches from one character/century to the next and back again after very short spurts, instead of changing chapter by chapter as many of my favorite authors do. Some sections were a few short paragraphs; others were a few pages; none were long enough to pull me into the characters' hearts until well into the story. I also felt it took a bit too long for the thematic connection among the men to come through. It was clear from the beginning that Olivier (1300s) researched Manlius (400s), and Julien (1940s) researched Olivier and, in turn, Manlius. But I didn't know why I should care that this research chain occurred until I was already a bit bored with the story. Subtle hints of it earlier than I discovered them, at least, would have created a bit more pull for me.
Now, with all that said, I do believe it is an excellent book, and I'm sure many readers just love it. It has its merits, and if it fits your preferences, I'm sure you can get lost in it the way I would've liked to.
There were a handful of quotes I jotted down as I read that struck me as insightful, beautiful. One was: "Because civilization depends on continually making the effort, of never giving in. It needs to be cared for by men of goodwill, protected from the dark" (p. 29-30). This idea was the main artery of the stories, and Julien summed up the idea well before making his final stand:
"'The evil done by men of goodwill is the worst of all.' That's what my Neoplatonic bishop said, and he was right. He knew. He had firsthand experience of it. We have done terrible things, for the best of reasons, and that makes it worse." (p. 375)
The idea of continual effort, a constant desire for bettering the group, and instances when we think we're doing that but perhaps are not, was moving, to say the least.
On a different note, I also liked the narrator's thought regarding one of Julien's childhood experiences: "Our lives can change direction in an instant, and it is possible that an entire adult can be determined by only a few such moments, sparkling like gold in the dross of everyday experience" (p. 33). That I can believe -- I see students change drastically within a few short months in my classroom and can sometimes pinpoint the catalyst, and I can recall "such moments" in my own life that have shaped who I am today. I wonder how often we identify these experiences as major players in our development when they're actually occurring, or do many of them only appear as such once we can look back and say, "Yes -- it was then that everything changed." Although this was not the main point of the novel, I think this is what I'll take away and continue considering.
