Product Description
This dazzlingly inventive novel from the bestselling author of Chatterton and Hawksmoor takes a timely look back at our history -- back from 2000 years in the future...Set 2,000 years in the future, Peter Ackroyd's imaginative new novel is by turns lively, inventive and surprising. Plato, the orator, summons the citizens of London on ritual occasions to impart the ancient history of their city. He dwells particularly on the unhappy era of Mouldwarp (AD 1500-2300), which existed before the dimming of the stars and the burning of machines. He lectures upon The Origin of Species by the nineteenth-century novelist Charles Dickens and upon the pantomimic routines of Sigmund Freud. He even provides a glossary of twentieth-century terms, and explains such early myths of creation as 'super-string theory' and 'relativity'. But then something happens. He has a dream, or a vision, or he goes on a real journey -- opinions are divided -- and enters a vast underground cavern, where citizens of Mouldwarp London still live. When Plato returns with stories of this lost world he is put on trial for corrupting the youth by means of lies and fables, since his words have spread consternation among them. Are their lives part of some greater reality? And, if they learn to doubt, perhaps they will be able to recognise a truth beyond that of their own world. All will depend upon the judgment of Plato by his fellow citizens.
From the Back Cover
"Richly revealing. . . . Unlike anything else Peter Ackroyd has written. . . . A jeu d'esprit."
--The New York Times Book Review"A lively tale and an invigorating meditation on the changelessness, after no matter how many eons, of human nature."
--Time"A serious divertissement, a brilliant fabulation that is the product of a playful, engaged, and well-stocked mind."
--The Boston Globe"A little book that raises some big questions. . . . You can finish it in a couple of hours. But if you read it carefully, you'll be thinking about it for days."
--Philadelphia Inquirer"Peter Ackroyd is a visionary, as
The Plato Papers makes clear. This is one of the oddest but most important and original novels to appear in many years. This masterpiece of contemporary writing will thrill and entertain readers for years to come, but it will do more than that: it will enlarge their vision, stimulating organs long forgotten and never known."
--Jay Parini, author of
The Last Station and
Robert Frost: A Life"What makes
The Plato Papers notable is not its fantastic invention but its intelligence...Excellently written...with a truly Socratic curiosity, making
The Plato Papers a philosophical good read."
--Malcolm Bradbury,
Financial Times"An invigorating mixture of satire, history, philosophy, morality, and linguistic investigation...it's like T.S. Eliot on speed meets Martian poetry but with better jokes."
--Michele Robert,
The Times"Articulate, comic, wise, delicate, melancholy, exquisite. It simultaneously deconstructs the story of the past and builds its own myth. In short, this is a carefully pulsed breath of a book, with an impact that sneaks into one's dreams."
--John Clute,
The Independent"A fantastic invention--excellently written."--Malcolm Bradbury --
From the Hardcover edition.
--This text refers to the
Hardcover
edition.
