- Paperback: 160 pages
- Publisher: Vintage; New edition edition (2 Mar 2000)
- Language English
- ISBN-10: 0099289954
- ISBN-13: 978-0099289951
- Product Dimensions: 19.4 x 12.6 x 1.6 cm
- Average Customer Review: 3.0 out of 5 stars See all reviews (3 customer reviews)
- Amazon Bestsellers Rank: 471,337 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
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Product Description
Amazon.co.uk Review
London, 3700 AD. London's greatest orator, Plato, regularly delivers bravura public lectures on the long and tumultuous history of what is now a peaceful, tranquil city, secure in the certainty of its own relationship to the past. Plato's lectures are particularly fascinated with the dark and confused epoch known as The Age of Mouldwarp, stretching from 1500 to 2300AD. Plato lectures the citizens on what is still known about the extraordinary figures and customs of the period from what evidence remains. These include orations on the clown Sigmund Freud and his comic masterpiece Jokes and their Relation to the Unconscious; the African singer George Eliot, apparently author of the poem The Waste Land; and Charles Dickens' greatest novel, The Origin of Species. Plato elaborates on the strange rites and rituals of the Age of Mouldwarp, including the cult of webs and nets that covered and enslaved the population. But Plato also begins to dialogue with his soul in the midst of these brilliant, precise public performances. Doubt begins to creep in to Plato's thinking. Is the past really past? And are the rituals of the present so superior to those of the past. These doubts lead Plato on a fateful journey.
Peter Ackroyd's Plato's Papers is an extraordinary novel that, as with the best of Ackroyd's fiction, treads a thin line between fantasy and biography, the genre so elegantly mastered by Ackroyd in his now classic studies of Dickens, T S Eliot and, most recently, The Life of Thomas More. The Plato Papers is a wonderfully observed satire on the ways in which historians and biographers can comically but also dangerously misrepresent the past and the arrogance that comes with philosophical certainty. --Jerry Brotton
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"
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Customer Reviews
Most Helpful Customer Reviews
3 of 3 people found the following review helpful
Format:Paperback
Ackroyd's debt to Moorcock was never more evident! Ackroyd's admiration for Gloriana (a Platonic London) is well known, but he seems to have read Moorcock's Dancers at the End of Time pretty thoroughly, too. Sorry, but all the jokes and ideas in this book are better done in Moorcock's fin-de-siecle celebration and Moorcock's read on Doctor Dee and the English music hall is not only earlier than Ackroyd's, it is more substantial. I loved Hawksmoor and Ackroyd's biographies are wonderful. But his fiction is only novel to those who have not read his influences.
3 of 3 people found the following review helpful
Format:Paperback
Virtually a novella, Ackroyd here reaches much deeper into the comic-mystical style of First Light. The Plato Papers is a hypnotic philosophical tract on the nature of time and humanity leavened with doses of linguistic humour. Considering the scope and depth of the book, it is astonishingly concise - sometimes frustratingly so (Plato's "journey" into the past is all too brief). It's more of a sketch than a painting, but all the more suggestive and thought-provoking for it.
2 of 2 people found the following review helpful
Format:Paperback
Once in a while you read a book which although not perfect, you do know that because of the issues it raises and the ambition it shows, it will last. This book has a fascinating concept and the plot unfolds quickly and without fuss. A flawed, but wonderful novel.
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