The Plato Papers Book

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 BrottonRead More