The medically trained Cola observes, helps, asks questions, makes himself amiable. This is the starting point for Iain Pears' audacious, erudite historical mystery, a massive 685-page novel that will have you sitting up all night and calling in sick the next day. It's that hard to put down. Early on there's the obligatory murder, the victim a contentious Anglican priest and fellow of New College, Oxford, discovered twitching on the floor of his room with a stomach full of arsenic-laced brandy. Pears employs the Rashomon -like device of four narrators who successively recount what they know, or think they know, or want us to think, about a set of events.
Cola leads off.
Pears gives us other comic bits of 17th-century English life as seen through continental eyes. For example, Cola can make nothing of a performance of King Lear . Cola agrees to treat the broken leg of an impoverished elderly woman, the wife of a now-dead political and religious radical. Her daughter, Sarah Blundy, a rebellious young woman possessed of a mysterious inner strength, proves a key figure in the novel. Cola and a British physician, Richard Lower, try the procedure on the older Blundy in a desperate effort to save her life.