Armaments, deceit, money make the man
Iain Pears burst onto the international publishing scene in 1997 with “An Instance of the Fingerpost,’’ a brilliant and vastly entertaining historical thriller concerning the murder of an Oxford don in 1663. This new novel also involves a mystery, set in the decades before World War I, and consists of a large cast of characters, an intricate, occasionally confusing plot, and three different narrators, locations, and time periods.
It is 1909, and Lord Ravenscliff, ne John Stone, the most powerful financier and arms dealer in Europe, has fallen to his death from the window of his London home. His widow, Lady Elizabeth, has doubts: Her husband had a fear of heights and never went near open windows. He also had a secret life; in his will he left a substantial bequest to a child he apparently fathered years ago.
Elizabeth hires Matthew Braddock, a crime reporter for a London newspaper, to find the child. As Braddock interviews Ravenscliff’s business associates and tours his armaments factories, he learns that money has been disappearing and that men with knowledge of it are being killed. He also falls in love with Elizabeth, something men in this book do with great regularity.
Braddock is unsuccessful at discovering anything except that whatever he has come across, including a near-assassination of a foreign leader, is far too dangerous to pursue. The telling of the story passes to Henry Cort and Paris in 1890.
Cort is a high-level spy, “possibly the most powerful man in the [British] Empire.’’ Years earlier, he recruited Elizabeth to spy for him. She now presides over the most influential salon in Paris.
In a wonderfully rendered scene, Cort learns of a plot to bring about the collapse of the Bank of England by creating a financial panic. What is at stake is no less than the fate of the Empire. He brokers a deal with Britain’s adversaries to keep the Bank of England solvent - with the shadowy help of Stone who, Cort learns, has created this international crisis for his own benefit. Cort also arranges the murder of Elizabeth’s blackmailer.
In the third and final section, we travel to Venice in 1867 with Stone as narrator. He tells of ingeniously stealing ownership of an advanced torpedo from its inventor, launching him into the world of armaments and high finance. He also has a torrid affair with a married woman, coincidentally the mother of Henry Cort. One might think the missing progeny is Henry’s half-sibling, but the truth turns out to be something much more unsettling and bizarre.
What keeps us reading is not our fondness for the characters, because almost all of them are thoroughly immoral, not particularly nice, or both. The women are of highly dubious origins and behavior, and shift identities at lighting pace, with one woman having five - count ‘em! five! - separate incarnations. The men are not the sort you would want sitting next to you at a dinner party if you were looking for a lively and honest exchange of ideas. You would also want to keep your hand firmly on your wallet.
What the book provides is the intellectual pleasure of being immersed in the world of high finance, industry, espionage, and intrigue, all set in a wider historical context leading to World War I. The writing is always intelligent, the history meticulously researched, and the descriptions occasionally quite brilliant. Who knew that finance had its own beauty and elegance, and that factories could be so captivating?
“Ravenscliff was money,’’ Braddock, the reporter, is told. “It’s all he did. All he ever did. From the standpoint of someone like you, obsessed with the tawdry details of humanity’s failings, he was an utter bore. You couldn’t even justify a paragraph on him.’’
In the hands of Iain Pears, the mystery behind the death (and life) of Lord Ravenscliff is well worth the multitudes of paragraphs in this compelling tale.
Virginia A. Smith is a freelance writer. 
