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Stone's Fall
Sat Jan 9 18:42:24 GMT 2010
In some respects, the title of Iain Pears' Stone's Fall is a metaphor for the book as a whole: say it out loud and it could be a literal statement of fact, the description of a rock's descent, or a shorthand for the downfall of a man called Stone. Of course, the final sense is the true one, but the title's ambiguity is nonetheless descriptive of the wider story, which describes a tale from three separate perspectives, slowly building up layers of nuance and subtlety until the final, genuinely unexpected denouement.
Much like An Instance of the Fingerpost, the only other Pears novel I've read to date, Stone's Fall is constructed to exploit the different views and truths that each narrator's perspective affords. Over the course of the book Stone's character shimmers and changes, moving from a shadowy figure in the background to become solid and real, developing and morphing with each passing page. Interestingly, as the tale of his downfall is told, the core theme of the book moves from being Stone's death to the life of his wife; another parallel with An Instance of the Fingerpost. Yet despite these similarities, Stone's Fall isn't merely a rewrite of An Instance of the Fingerpost in a different time period, it is a vibrant work in its own right.
In this novel, Pears explores some weighty themes: determinism, the ethics of foreign policy, the logical conclusions of a capitalist society; and he does so with a deft hand, maintaining pace and tension throughout 600-odd pages and three narrators, spread over three locations. It's an impressive feat, but it comes with some cost to the reader: characters must be remembered and catalogued, momentum must be maintained between narrators, and the ambiguities and contradictions that develop as each narrator adds his voice to the mix must be navigated. For the motivated reader, however, it is a worthwhile price to pay.