Pears’s An Instance of the Fingerpost
The 1997 novel by Iain Pears is an account of the death by poisoning of an Oxford professor in 1663, told from four different vantage points. Critics have drawn analogies to Akira Kurosawa’s film “Rashomon” (Kirkus Reviews 1997; Bernstein 1998), but there are significant differences between the two mechanisms and their import. Kurosawa’s story gives four accounts of eyewitnesses to a killing, each based on the same facts but on which the witnesses place different interpretations. In Fingerpost, three of Pears’s narrators have reasons to benefit from the professor’s death and reasons to conceal or even change facts. They develop separate theories of why someone else was the murderer. The fourth claims to be the murderer, although the poison was not intended as lethal, as he did not fully understand what the substance was, and wanted instead to spite the professor, who was planning to do what we would now call “self-medication.”
This is a novel of ideas in the sense that it deals on multiple levels with questions of epistemology. Restoration England was a time of intellectual tumult. The university scholars are in the process of a major debate in the philosophy of science. Quotations from Francis Bacon introduce each of the narratives, and the book’s title is drawn from one of them (Pears, 1997, p. 527). Empiricism is challenging first principles. Experimentation challenges rationality. The Enlightenment is coming, but it isn’t here. It is also an exploration of ontology. In metaphysical terms, it raises questions of God’s will, and which version of Christianity is the true faith. Restoration has brought a notionally Protestant, high Church of England king, Charles II, to the throne, but is he a closet Roman Catholic? Supporters of Oliver Cromwell’s Puritans still cling on to power, despite Cromwell’s death. Ontology is also the issue the reader faces about the murder. Which of these radically different accounts is true? Moreover, most of the characters in the novel were real people, and the varying accounts of their actions dovetail neatly with the biographies of the people these characters represent.
As the final version of the story unfolds, however, the ambiguities are resolved. The fourth account, by a historian, is first and foremost a confession. Of the four narrators, only he claims first-hand knowledge. But even he was not present at the time the professor drank the poison. His is an empirical account, based on evidence. He placed the poison in the bottle of brandy. He is the alibi for the young woman servant convicted of the crime. And he alone knows (or perhaps only “claims”) that she somehow did not die in her public execution by hanging. His account even tells his readers about the clues they have perhaps overlooked in this 691-page, 350,000-word verbal romp through 17th Century culture, diction and grammar. He thus demonstrates the superiority of his account to the other three narrators, and the superiority of his knowledge to the readers.
This is a story that unfolds multiple versions of the personalities of the characters, which provides a postmodern, Rashomon-like relativity, at least through the first three accounts. But the world of Fingerpost is not relativistic. The novel plumps for history and empiricism over rationality and deduction, and for one narrator telling of the truth and exposing the others as liars. There is “truth” at the end of the story, a truth that explains what readers know was the rest of the story: the collapse of Charles II’s reign, renewed religious strife, the shift in the family line of the monarchy, the coming of the Enlightenment, and the slow victory of empiricism over faith. That the victory is slow means the “history” reveals more than even science.
This is not therefore a character-based fictional account. Characters exist, but they are revealed over the four narratives as more complex, multilayered, than in many murder mysteries. But they are revealed as static, not dynamic, and the revelation is a process of coming to knowledge, not of development. Plot is complex, but only because the four narrators seek to disguise or reveal different plots, plots against the king, against the Church of England, against the dissenters, against the march of science. This is a novel of multiple ideas, enacted though archetypes of the philosophical positions articulated, albeit articulated by narrators with very different ideologies driving the ideas they present.
Watching Rashomon, audiences experience ambiguity and uncertainty. All four accounts are based on the same facts, but the meaning of those facts depend on the witnesses’ interpretations. Reading Fingerpost is, by contrast, an exercise in experiencing historical contingency. New facts come to light over time; the reader’s judgement of their meaning in develops, leading to a “reasonable” understanding of truth. Enlightenment arrives through sustained attention to the accumulating evidence. The 20th or 21st Century reader knows more even than the most reliable of the book’s four narrators.
[Disclosure: More than thirty years ago, Iain Pears and I were colleagues at Reuters. When he told me he was quitting, I was disappointed and jealous. He was off to write books, he said. He’s done a series of novels about the crime in the art world of Italy as well as standalone ones like Fingerpost. The art historical/crime ones are also fine.]
Pears, I. (1997). An Instance of the Fingerpost. London: Viking.