More than an historical novel

An Instance of the Fingerpost by Iain Pears Jonathan Cape, $280 It is 1663. Charles II has recently been restored to the English throne. The Anglican Church is ruthless in its suppression of both Catholics and Low Church sectarians.

Marco da Cola, fictional gentleman of Venice and experimenter in matters medical, turns up in Oxford and becomes involved with a raft of genuine historical figures from the academic and political circles of the period. One of them, Robert Grove - a senior fellow of New College - dies from poisoning. The murderer may or may not be the strong-willed servant girl arrested for the crime.

From the pens of four protagonists - first Cola, then the semi-fictional Jack Prestcott, the great mathematician and codebreaker John Wallis, and the historian Anthony Wood - come conflicting, subjective and self-serving versions of what happened. Each narrator is seen through his own eyes and others'.

The web of deceit is almost as complex and intricate as the web of self-deception. Nothing is as it seems, least of all the nature of the girl, who may be a powerful and evil witch - or something altogether more disturbing.

The 'fingerpost' of the title (which turns out to be a common-or-garden signpost, of a kind still found at English country road junctions) is a reference from a treatise on evidence by the 17th-century essayist Francis Bacon. It is a metaphor for the eyewitness. When an eyewitness appears and tells his side of the story, the focus shifts away from the murder - which for some of the narrators was never the central issue.

The mystery actually deepens once the murder is solved, and the suspense is maintained until the penultimate page - although it is possible that someone better versed in Restoration history than this reviewer might have hazarded a guess at the outcome.