An Instance of the Fingerpost

⚖The case for it

Four men give four full accounts of the same 1663 Oxford death, and each one arrives contradicting the last, so reading it is a job of continuous reassessment. Pears builds Restoration Oxford thickly, early experimental medicine and alchemy and the room where the Royal Society is about to happen. The first narrator, an Italian medical student, gets entangled with an old woman and her daughter in a thread readers say cost them a night’s sleep. There is dry humour buried in the dialogue rather than delivered. Critics call it “Rashomon meets The Name of the Rose.”

— the honest librarian

✕The case against

At roughly seven hundred pages the book is “almost as long as the 17th century itself,” and readers say half of it could go. The two middle narrators are actively unpleasant company you push through for the prose rather than the person. The religious and political digressions lose anyone without Restoration history, and readers admit to skimming. The Oxford men blur into “rancid Oxford dons and sniffy cryptographers.” The middle sags through “endless scenes and developments that are actually dead-ends,” and one reader concludes the whole “does not challenge or elevate.”

— the honest librarian

14h

honest hours

20

sittings