It isn't often that a book renders me incapable of coherent speech, but this one has; as the post title says, wow!
Iain Pears' clever, immensely entertaining Stone's Fall is six hundred pages of closely written, complex and intricately plotted narrative, fascinatingly detailed in both its essentials and its incidentals. Set out in reverse chronological order, beginning in London in 1909, moving back to 1890 Paris and then to Venice in 1867, the story is told by three narrators, the last of these being John Stone himself, financier, armaments maufacturer, man of fabulous wealth and incomparable business acumen. At the book's beginning he has fallen to his death from a window of his London home. Foul play is suspected, but there is no evidence of such. What happened to cause Stone's fall?
All is eventually revealed, but the plot is beautifully played out and dexterously managed, as the mystery is balanced by a love story, espionage, Buchanesque antics, commercial manoeuvrings and a financial crisis of the grandest, most serious scale. Iain Pears clearly has vast knowledge of his period and his subject matter, but also great skill in turning that raw material into an utterly gripping, plausible novel. Intelligent and enormously enjoyable - what more can I say?
(Two more books by Iain Pears come particularly highly recommended: An Instance of the Fingerpost and The Dream of Scipio
