What has been will be again, what has been done will be done again; there is nothing new under the sun," Ecclesiastes reminds us. And now, in the wake of a financial meltdown that's seen the usual Wall Street bonuses suddenly decried, London's Canary Wharf singing no more and Iceland gone bankrupt, a historical mystery-thriller about a bank bailout and shady accounting hits the shelves. It's a good read, though not a great novel.
Iain Pears, best known for his 17th-century Oxford mystery An Instance of the Fingerpost, turns to the late 19th and early 20th centuries, when banks are becoming as powerful as governments and the arms trade is alight, igniting a slow-burning imperial fuse to the powder keg of the First World War. Stone's Fall ripples out from one man's death - London financier John Stone's suspicious plummet from his study window in March, 1909 - but much of it involves today's familiar maxim for investigators: "Follow the money."
- Stone's Fall, by Iain Pears, Spiegel & Grau, 800 pages, $34.95
Stone has made his, as journalist Matthew Braddock discovers, with the building of battleships. Braddock is employed by Stone's widow, Elizabeth, to discover more about a revelation in his will, but the more he investigates, the more he becomes tangled up in anarchist plots, blackmail schemes and international Machiavellian money machinations. Braddock suspects the truth is being covered up by Henry Cort, a spy with some obligation to Stone.
As the net of characters and suspects widens, the book sinks deeper into the past. Part II floats through Paris in 1890, as Cort recounts his ties to Stone and Elizabeth during his early days in espionage. Part III sails through Venice in 1867 with Stone himself, recalling his career-changing encounters with Cort's father and Macintyre, a Northerner building a new kind of torpedo (Macintyre seems loosely based on Robert Whitehead, creator of the first self-propelled torpedo in 1866).
Stone's Fall zips along as a thriller. The first part, especially, is never a slow-boiling, watched plot, but a steadily simmering, action-filled story, almost like a screenplay in its scenes and movement. Braddock hits London neighbourhoods and travels to Salisbury, Newcastle, even the Isle of Wight, trying to crack this shadowy cipher of a businessman behind one of the world's largest naval operations. The other parts add some knots to the tale and then tie up loose ends, with the best and most bitter twist saved for last.
Pears, a former journalist, adds some nice touches about the profession. Braddock frequents pubs to trade information with fellow reporters; a languid Paris correspondent tells Cort, the new newsman, that one piece submitted every fortnight to their editor should be enough; a Times scribe grumbles about getting caught out on a quote he had concocted as he waits to report on a royal procession: "So no making things up for a while. I do wish they'd get a move on. I want my lunch ...."
The novel blurs the bylines between journalist, spy, financier and courtesan, for whom information can be the most valuable commodity of all. Braddock begins to feel he's whoring himself. Cort pretends to be a journalist in order to uncover rival countries' economic secrets and military plans.
The money trail is a sly ruse: Love, it turns out, is the key to the mystery of John Stone's fall. And through the codicil of a will, a classic 19th-century plot device, Pears moves into a realm familiar to any Victorian reader, a world of degeneracy and alienists, mad passions and Gothic hauntings, especially in Venice, shown standing in gloomy, foul waters.
Yet the history in this historical thriller feels hollow. Sentences are often short and sometimes fragmented, which is out of keeping with writing of that time. And why, for instance, write "got off a horse" rather than simply "dismounted"? Americanisms such as "getting down to business" or "in a minority on that one" creep in. Elements of the Edwardian era - suffragism, anti-Semitism, even the growing wariness of Germany - seem more sprinkled in than woven through. A book of 800 pages demands a little sprawl, some flourishes of language and brilliant colour, such as the woman here who must suck her ill-fitting false teeth back into her mouth after each bite of food.
Pears proves one of his characters' admissions too well: "Here the limitations of accounts come into play. They can tell of the movements of men, of their money, but rarely give much of an insight into their motives." This account needs more of such insight. The narrator of each part never comes fully alive and is mostly defined by his actions, not perceptions, unfitting for a journalist and a spy. Stone's memoir never reveals the genius behind his fine art of capitalist organization. While Elizabeth is an intriguing mix of Mata Hari, the Holmes stories' Irene Adler and Dangerous Liaisons' Marquise de Merteuil, another female becomes a bland counterfeit of the "madwoman in the attic" stereotype.
Stone's Fall does show, as in Pears's reimagining of the 1890 crisis when the Bank of England bailed out Barings, that the financial world has long been a confidence game, gambling on trust and trading in amorality. So nothing may be new under the sun, even in business, but a story sounding the echoes of modern mistakes in past times still needs to make its telling seem new and fresh, and by that reckoning, this account comes up short.
Brian Gibson is a professor at Université Sainte-Anne who has been openly trading information on Edwardian literature for years, but only for banal, intellectually profitable purposes .