Review
"Funny--insightful--scintillating." -
NOW"A marvellous fable for our times...funny, wise and strange.... Ackroyd has written what we always knew that he alone of his generation could produce: a timeless literary masterpiece." - A.N. Wilson
"Articulate, comic, wise, delicate, melancholy, exquisite...a carefully-pulsed breath of a book with an impact that sneaks into one's dreams." -
Independent"The pervasive presence of a London transformed by the mythical and magical possibilities of its distant past and its imagined future is one of the attractions [of
The Plato Papers]." -
TLS
Product Description
On ritual occasions, Plato, the orator, summons the citizens of London to impart the ancient history of their city, dwelling particularly on the unhappy era of Mouldwarp (AD 1500-2300). He lectures upon
The Origin of Species by the nineteenth-century novelist Charles Dickens and on Sigmund Freud while providing a glossary of twentieth-century terms, and explaining such early myths of creation as "super-string theory'"and "relativity." But then he has a dream, or vision, or he goes on a real journey - opinions are divided - and enters a vast underground cavern, where citizens of Mouldwarp London still live. On his return, Plato shares his stories of this lost world, but his words spread consternation among his fellow citizens and they quickly put him on trial for corrupting the youth with his lies and fables.