A fingerpost (sometimes referred to as a guide post) is a type of sign post consisting of a post with one or more arms, known as fingers, pointing in the direction of travel to places named on the fingers, often including distance information. Oliver Cromwell, not really relevant to this book except for the destabilized government he left after his death.

An Instance of the Fingerpost by Iain Pears - Reading Guide

I thank author Pears for enhancing my poor education. He recounts and alludes to the English Civil War and the uprising of religious sects (counter to the Chuch of England) which undoubtedly informed American Founders with their own nation-building in the next Century. Restoration England was a sharply demarcated world—there were those who clearly belonged (Royalists and Protestants) and those who clearly did not (Roundheads, Freemasons, Quakers, and Papists.) Even Oxford University, during a veritable golden age of scientific discovery and academic advancement, is depicted in the novel as a dangerous place for free-thinkers and outsiders. What social or political conditions made such rigid definitions of “the outsider” necessary? Similarly, what constituted “radical beliefs”?Let me confess that I am not a great reader of thrillers or detective fiction. The latter in particular, it seems to me, lies under the tyranny of procedure -- the scene of the crime, the autopsy, the interviews, the suspects, the false accusations -- Ebooks are now quite venerable in computing terms, but it is striking how small an impact they have had on narrative structure; for the most part, they are still just ordinary books in a cheap format. An analogy is the early days of cinema, when film-makers did little more than plonk cameras in front of a stage and film a play. It took some time before they realised that by exploiting the new possibilities the technology offered – cutting, editing, closeups, lighting and so on – they could create a new art form that did not replace theatre, but did things theatre could not. Computing power properly understood and used can perhaps eventually do something of the same; not supplant orthodox books – which are perfectly good in most cases – but come into play when they are insufficient. So this book was really trying my patience with its procession of rancid Oxford dons and sniffy cryptographers and the standard government-issue unreliable narrators all calling each other bad names. The "witch" is Sarah Blundy whose father was a Cromwell intriguer and who has fallen on hard times since his death.

An Instance of the Fingerpost by Iain Pears: 9781573227957 An Instance of the Fingerpost by Iain Pears: 9781573227957

More recently, the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California has installed LED fingerposts which orient themselves to planets, missions, and exoplanets using data supplied by the Deep Space Network. [11] Among Prerogative Instances I will put in the fourteenth place Instances of the Fingerpost, borrowing the term from the fingerposts which are set up where roads part, to indicate the several directions. These I also call Decisive and Judicial, and in some cases, Oracular and Commanding Instances. I explain them thus. When in the investigation of any nature the understanding is so balanced as to be uncertain to which of two or more natures the cause of the nature in question should be assigned on account of the frequent and ordinary concurrence of many natures, instances of the fingerpost show the union of one of the natures with the nature in question to be sure and indissoluble, of the other to be varied and separable; and thus the question is decided, and the former nature is admitted as the cause, while the latter is dismissed and rejected. Such instances afford very great light and are of high authority, the course of interpretation sometimes ending in them and being completed. Sometimes these instances of the fingerpost meet us accidentally among those already noticed, but for the most part they are new, and are expressly and designedly sought for and applied, and discovered only by earnest and active diligence.A contrast portrayed in the novel is, on one hand, a philosophy based on ancient and medieval learning, and, on the other, the scientific method that was beginning to be applied in physics, chemistry and medicine. An historical fiction lovers delight. Someday I will likely read this again to try to trace how Pears did this slight of hand. intelligent and well written ... for the reader who likes to be teased, who likes his plots as baroque and ingenious as possible, (Fingerpost) will not disappoint. Wallis - the cryptographer - who has had dealings with Thurloe (as does young Prestcott). His paranoia causes him to see conspiracies - much as Prestcott does. all of which can make such stories as weirdly stylized as Kabuki theater. But ''An Instance of the Fingerpost'' is a good deal more than a detective story. The whodunit element, prominent in the opening section, recedes

An Instance of the Reading the Detectives - Buddy reads: An Instance of the

Inter praerogativas instantiarum, ponemus loco decimo quarto Instantias Crucis; translato vocabulo a Crucibus, quae erectae in biviis indicant et signant viarum separationes. ... Oliver Cromwell is dead; the Levellers, Diggers and other such factions -- with their wild dreams of an egalitarian society -- have been destroyed or dispersed; peace, finally, has returned to a ravaged land . . . or has it? I actually liked An Instance of the Fingerpost even better than the previous Iain Pears book I read, Stone's Fall, which I also found enjoyable and impressive and just a bit beyond me at times but not to the point where I couldn't appreciate the reading experience. In An Instance of the Fingerpost, we have four narratives of the same set of events. The first narrator hints that he may be unreliable by letting us know he's leaving out details he finds unimportant, but basically tells a cohesive story which includes a mysterious death. The second narrator casts doubt on the first narrator's version but also, increasingly, on his own. He is followed by a third narrator who does the same, and then a fourth who seems more reliable than the other three (though who knows, really?) and offers some astonishing revelations. But whether I missed the clues, or the author simply didn’t leave any clues, doesn’t matter. An Instance of the Fingerpost is simply mesmerising; fascinating in its ability to show what life was like shortly after Charles II. was restored; how science was a subordinate part of religious beliefs; how political ambitions could elevate or destroy a person’s life. In most cases, they are used to give guidance for road users, but examples also exist on the canal network, for instance. They are also used to mark the beginning of a footpath, bridleway, or similar public path.

A "novel" novel (please pardon the attempted humor), where unreliable narrators outnumber purported reliability by a long shot. Once again my happiness at not living in the 17th century is validated as I read of the physical squalor, the political and religious unrest and distrust in England after the restoration of Charles II, the relative worthlessness of the average person's life. Amidst that there is the glimmer of new knowledge and education at Oxford the seat of "Instance". I see your soul,” She said, her voice suddenly dropping to a whisper which chilled my blood. “I know what it is and what is its shape. I can feel it hiss in the night and taste its coldness in the day. I hear it burning, and I touch its hate.” The Name of the Rose will now have to share that position with An Instance of the Fingerpost . This book is a master piece of storytelling. I was glued to it from the first – or rather, I had my earphones glued to my ears, as I listened to the audio version. Iain Pears is a Coventry-born and Oxford-educated art historian and author of historical mysteries, and An Instance of the Fingerpost is his most famous novel. Good historians are not necessarily good authors and good authors are not necessarily good historians, but in Fingerpost Pears manages to strike a comfortable balance between both professions. I was actually about to say something about the ending but I won’t. I would have considered it a spoiler, however vague it would have been. But I kept in mind who these men were, so I was more than satisfied with it.