The Plato Papers - Softcover

Ackroyd, Peter

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0099289954 ISBN 13: 9780099289951

Publisher: Vintage, 2000

Synopsis

Paperback. Pub Date: 2000 Pages: 138 in Publisher: VINTAGE Plato the orator. Summons the citizens of London on ritual occasions to impart the ancient history of their city He dwells particularly on the unhappy era of Mouldwarp (AD 1500 - 2300). which existed before the dimming of the stars and the burning of the machines. He lectures upon THE ORGIN OF SPECIES by the nineteenth-century novelist Charles Dickens and upon the pantomimic routines of Sigmund Freud. But then he has a dream. or vision. or he goes on a real journey-opinions are divided - and enters a vast underground cavern. where citizens of Mouldwarp London still live. When Plato returns with stories of this lost world he is put on trial for corrupting the youth by means of lies and fables. Are their lives part of some greater reality And. if they learn to doubt. perhaps they will be able to recognise a truth beyon...

About this title

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

"An invigorating mixture of satire, history, philosophy, morality and linguistic investigation... it reads like a spoof of New Age intellectualism... a lament for the millenium; a brave cry in the wilderness" (Michele Roberts The Times)

"Articulate, comic, wise, delicate, melancholy, exquisite... a carefully-pulsed breath of a book with an impact that sneaks into one's dreams" (Independent)

"The Plato Papers is a serious divertissement, a brilliant fabulation that is the product of a playful, engaged, and well-stocked mind... It unleashes large, tolling resonances" (Boston Globe)

"The Plato Papers can be enjoyed as a jeu d'esprit, but for students of Ackroyd it is something more... Richly revealing" (New York Times)

About this edition

• Publisher: Vintage
• Publication date: 2000
• ISBN 10: 0099289954
• ISBN 13: 9780099289951
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 160