Delve Into Arcadia Engineered By Iain Pears Released As Paperbound

is the kind of book that makes you wish you could crawl into it and live there, No idea where to start reviewing this one, It is not a book that lends itself an easy explanation, The first chapter will have you thinking Fantasy, Later chapters will have you thinking Historical Fiction, Beyond that youll say, “Ah! I have it, Science Fiction it is. ” Its all of them really,

The first half of this book will seem likeorordifferent plot threads, Youll be questioning how in the world any of them could possibly be related, Then slowly the threads begin to come together and the connections are made and youll sort of just be in awe of it all.


The setting and the prose are beautifully told, From the very first chapter Pears sucks you in and whisks you away, There are several parts that will make you laugh out loud, The book is told in a literary style, and yet it seems to constantly be poking fun at itself or its predecessors Tolkien for one, perhaps even Shakespeare for their occasional absurdity.


The characters are lots of fun, I adored Rosie, Lytten, and Angela, They arent like any characters I can think of, There were a handful that did feel sort of onedimensional but I think it was with good reason and purposeful on the authors part.
Then there was a handful that felt one dimensional and I dont think was purposeful on the authors part, but the result of them being background characters who happened to get their own POV chapters.


And this is the reason I deducted a star, With so many shifting view points, there were inevitably story lines I loved and was eager to read, and then as the book went on there were story lines that I really just stopped caring about all together.
I think I skimmed some of them eventually, The Oldmanter, Jack More, Hanslip plot threads I really just didnt care about at all, Every time we jumped to them I just sighed and sort of rushed through, It isnt that they werent relevant or necessary, they sort of were, Its just that they werent really told as well, It seemed like maybe the author didnt even enjoy writing them,

Major spoilers: I struggle to see what the Devils Handwriting manuscript had to do with anything.
Which was why I was so bored reading it, It wasnt left there by Angela, it was left there by Grange, We are never told if Angela ever gets her hands on it again to leave Emily a message, Yet, Emily does somehow survive also I cannot believe I did not see that one coming! The ending is never exactly explained, I dont know when the bomb was sent to explode, I sort of got the feeling it exploded in Oldmanters time, Because if he set it to explode any time before he presumably might not exist, History would have adjusted itself to account for it already, . . and they would have just been exactly where they were anyway, That was the whole point in the beginning, that regardless if Nixon or Kennedy won the presidency in,years fromthings were still going to happen more or less as they were already set to happen.
So anyway, everything else being so properly explained and concrete, the ending left me with a bit of a sour taste in my mouth.



So all in all I really enjoyed and loved it, I think its better to read this going in blind with no expectations and be surprised by it all as you go, Id recommend to fans of fantasy and science fiction, I do have a couple of tiny qualms with this minor fatphobia and a relationship with an uncomfortable age gap, but the craft and originality of this book are unparalleled.
It broke my brain a little, An Oxford don is writing a fantasy book like his colleagues Lewis and Tolkien did, Hes visited every now and then by a young girl who helps around the house and who discovers a magic mirror in his basement that leads into a pastoral wonderland almost like the fantasy landscape the don is creating.
A couple hundred years in the future, a psychomathematician has discovered a portal to parallel universes which are real and has chosen to hide in one because she's nuts.
The magic mirror is hers which she left in the dons basement after travelling back in time, Theres also a young lad training to be a Storyteller, which is some kind of priest,

Imof the way into thispage doorstopper and Im giving up here, This is well past thepage limit I usually allow for a book to convince me its worth continuing with, Theres no story nada, zip! Just these boring characters who arent doing anything, The don reads his fantasy crap to colleagues in a pub then sits about his house with his fat cat eating sponge cake, The girl meets some passedout traveller and listens to the don patronise her, The kid in training to be a priest sees a ghost and is patronised by his teachers, Come on! What is Iain Pears doing!

The psychomathematicians chapters were vaguely interesting, particularly the glimpse into the parallel world where Nixon became President, not JFK.
Even then though what was the point And most of the

time her future science dystopia into tedious office politics,

Theres also a muchpublicised app to accompany the novel, All it is, is the novel which you have to purchase piecemeal laid out differently with the “plot” lines visually laid out allowing the reader to select which pathways they want to read it.
Apparently Pears vision was to create multiple versions of Arcadia to give each reader a different reading experience, Ambitious, sure, but the finished article just looks gimmicky and underwhelming, particularly as it's far less innovative than it would have you believe,

I read Iain Pears An Instance of the Fingerpost when it first came out and loved it, A postEnglish Civil War whodunit told from the perspective of four different narrators where it was up to the reader to decide who was telling the truth a superb mystery! Arcadia though is sprawling tedium much like its namesake written by Sir Philip Sidney in Elizabethan times who is referenced in the text.
I dont know what the story is, why I should care, nor am I interested in any of the characters, Im not about to force myself through several hundred more pages of this crap so long, Arcadia! In Cold War England, Professor Henry Lytten, having renounced a career in espionage, is writing a fantasy novel that dares to imagine a world less fraught than his own.
He finds an unlikely confidante in Rosie, an inquisitive young neighbor who, while chasing after Lytten's cat one day, stumbles through a doorway in his cellar and into a stunning and unfamiliar bucolic landscaperemarkably like the fantasy world Lytten is writing about.
There she meets a young boy named Jay who is about to embark on a journey that will change both their lives, Elsewhere, in a distopian society where progress is controlled by a corrupt ruling elite, the brilliant scientist Angela Meerson has discovered the potential of a powerful new machine.
When the authorities come knocking, she will make an important decisionone that will reverberate through all these different lives and worlds, Дълго обмислях как да започна този текст, а и имах нужда от време, за да разплета кълбото от емоции, които книгата породи у мен. "Аркадия" на Иън Пиърс прилича на онзи чудат реквизит за магьоснически номера, състоящ се от привидно несвързани по между си метални обръчи, които обаче реално не можем да отделим един от друг, колкото и упорито да се опитваме.

Всичко започва уютно и по английски, когатогодишната Роузи тръгва да търси една изчезнала котка, а открива портал към друг свят, който се намира в мазето на оксфордски професор. Че къде другаде Или за да перифразирам популярния цитат на Толкин: Започва път от моето мазе.

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