Edition: U.S. / Global

Moral Choices in a Thriller Spanning 1,500 Years

Published: August 7, 2002

The British author Iain Pears is very tall, very thin and has the hollow-cheeked look of someone who lives mainly in the realm of the mind. He was folded awkwardly in a chair in a restaurant in midtown Manhattan and describing trying to write his novel ''The Dream of Scipio,'' published in June by Riverhead Books.

''I was up against my limits,'' Mr. Pears said. ''Getting the characters right was agony.''

''Agony'' is understandable. ''The Dream of Scipio'' is 396 pages long, spans 1,500 years and has three different stories and three different characters living in three different centuries. It is a philosophical novel dealing with subjects like Neoplatonism (the more one tries to understand God, the closer one gets to him) and the integration of Hellenism into Christianity during the fifth century.

But Mr. Pears, whose previous novel, ''An Instance of the Fingerpost,'' an academic murder mystery set in the 17th century, was a best seller, seems to have pulled it off. A reviewer for The Christian Science Monitor called ''The Dream of Scipio'' ''wildly entertaining,'' and another in The Daily News in New York describes it as a ''genre-bending historical and social thriller.'' Part of the fun, that critic wrote, ''is breaking it into its smaller parts, then reassembling it into a fascinating whole.''

John Crowley, a novelist, writing in The New York Times Book Review, had some reservations about Mr. Pears's writing, saying it was ''sturdy, sometimes pedestrian'' and that ''all his characters sound like the narrator, and like one another.'' But, Mr. Crowley wrote, ''none of this will detract from most readers' enjoyment.'' To try and describe ''Scipio'' in the simplest terms: Manlius Hippomanes, a nobleman, lives in fifth-century Provence during the last days of the Roman Empire. A scholarly, refined man, Manlius writes a commentary on Cicero's essay ''The Dream of Scipio,'' a tract on morality, with some Neoplatonism thrown in. The best way to achieve goodness, Cicero said, is by being a good citizen.

But when it comes to putting these great ideas into practice, Hippomanes fails. The barbarians are coming, and to preserve his civilized Roman way of life, he makes an alliance with Burgundian invaders against the even more dangerous Visigoths. To consolidate his power he cynically converts to Christianity and becomes a bishop. He also allows a pogrom against the Jews to distract the population from what he is doing.

Cut to 900 years later during the Black Death. Olivier de Noyen, a Provençal poet, discovers Manlius' manuscript and writes a poem about it. As the Black Death rages through 14th-century Europe, Jews are held responsible and once again are hunted down and killed. Olivier falls in love with a woman who lives in the Jewish community and succeeds in saving the Jews by persuading Pope Clement VI to protect them. Unlike Manlius, he does the right thing. But here comes the murder-mystery part of the novel: Olivier meets a brutal end, and the circumstances surrounding his death are not what they appear.

Fast-forward to 1940's Provence. The scholar Julien Barneuve discovers Olivier's manuscript and is inspired. He decides that to be a good citizen and protect French civilization from the barbarian invaders, the Nazis, he must join the collaborationist Vichy government. But Julien falls in love with a Jewish woman, and the fallacy of his compromise results in a scene of shocking violence.

So what made Mr. Pears undertake such a novel? He said he was haunted by the figure of Jérome Carcopino, the French classicist who was the author of ''Daily Life in Ancient Rome'' and was also minister of youth and education in the Vichy government. Carcopino promulgated the anti-Semitic laws that deprived Jewish professors of their jobs. ''He was the epitome of the humanist tradition,'' Mr. Pears said. ''How could he do this?'' Mr. Pears said he asked himself.

The question was made more powerful, he said, because Mr. Pears's American-born wife, Ruth Harris is ''a nice Jewish girl,'' and many members of her family live in Israel.

''This was the most advanced civilization the world had ever seen -- how did this happen?,'' Mr. Pears said of Germany. ''The standard interpretation is that the Holocaust was the result of barbarism on the part of the Germans,'' he continued. ''But not to me. This is a nation that brought us Goethe and Beethoven.''

''What happened during the Nazi period came out of civilization,'' he said. ''When you say you are going to protect the state from barbarism, it is time to be very afraid, because civilized countries have greater resources and can do greater damage.''

At the heart of the novel is an examination of the historical roots of anti-Semitism. The book is about ''how the historical baggage that we carry around without our even knowing it sometimes can determine our behavior,'' Mr. Pears said. ''My line is: we are really just historical constructs. How we react to an attack on the Jews, what Julien thinks of the survivability of the Jews and how much he values them, are part of our emotional inheritance. These things aren't thought out or reasoned.''