A decade ago Iain Pears wrote An Instance Of The Fingerpost, a dazzling, intricately plotted story of murder, Restoration politics, religious dissent, maths, espionage and the discovery of the circulation of the blood by William Harvey in 1663. Its ambitious structure saw the same story told from four different perspectives, each adding and subtracting to an overall picture that only came together at the very end of the novel. It was a thrilling book, as broad in scope as Neal Stephenson’s Baroque Cycle and as well executed as The Name of The Rose and so much did I enjoy its twists, turns and diversions, I must have given a dozen copies away to family and friends.

However although anyone who read An Instance Of The Fingerpost will easily recall its brilliance, if they went on to read Pears’ other books they will just as easily recall the huge disappointment that nothing else in his canon came close to matching it. Now at last with Stone’s Fall Iain Pears has written the book that lovers of An Instance Of The Fingerpost have been waiting ten years for – and it is an absolute joy.

Like An Instance Of The Fingerpost, Stone’s Fall is a huge and hugely ambitious book of ideas. It is an epic in every meaningful sense, yet remain at heart a novel with a very human story. The best of Pears is all here – the story told from different angles, the gradual emergence of a fuller picture, the attention to detail and the myriad ideas that never get in the way of either the characters or the story.

After a brief prologue following the quiet death in 1953 from old age of Elizabeth, Countess Ravenscliff, the action begins in earnest by switching back to London in 1909. John Stone, Lord Ravenscliff, a super wealthy financier, armaments manufacturer and newspaper proprietor has fallen to his death from the first-floor window of his study leaving behind a complex business empire. Although Ravenscliff may be one of the most influential people in the Empire with enough power to topple governments, no-one knows much about him or his business and now nobody seems to know how to execute his will. The mysterious Countess Elizabeth, Stone’s widow, engages the services of a reporter to investigate these details that, when resolved, will allow the execution to proceed.

This is genre-transcending historical fiction of the highest order, with a wide, time-spanning canvas that moves in three parts from London in 1909, back to Paris in 1890 and finally to Venice in 1857. It is all about John Stone, yet in the first part he is dead, in the second a background figure and only in the third is he centre stage as the narrator. Stone’s Fall is a character study of a life lived with real power and wealth and each section gradually reveals more about his rise and his fall. This is big Citizen Kane territory and Stone’s Fall is easily a good enough book to draw on such influences and come out on top.

The second part in particular is both exciting and deliberately apposite to today’s world. It covers the exploits of Henry Cort a reluctant British spy uncovering a plot by the dastardly French and Russians to destroy London’s role as the financial capital of the world by engineering a run on the bank of England. The complexity of this plot is neatly contrasted to the fragility of hitherto seemingly unstoppable markets, as one character puts it “never in the whole of humanity has so much power been generated by such a feeble instrument.” That the strongest entity in the world can be so vulnerable is not a contradiction we now find difficulty believing. Nor will it be difficult to credit how it is the banking world that both causes and solves the crisis not the newly powerless governments. These parallels, while clearly drawn are done so with both great subtlety and ingenuity and if he final third, dealing with Stone’s rise, falls a tad short of these dizzy heights then fair enough, it t is only by a small margin on what has gone before.

As much as Stephenson or Eco, Pears is unafraid to make the reader work a bit for their pleasure and Stone’s Fall is a rare beast in being both an exhilarating read and one that is at once intellectually and emotionally satisfying. This is clearly a master craftsmen at work. Tour de force is an overused term but if Stone’s Fall isn’t it then I don’t know what is.

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