Stone’s Fall – Iain Pears

The book starts not with businessman extraordinaire John Stone’s fatal fall from his study window on to a London street in 1909, but with his widow’s funeral in Paris 44 years later.  That event releases a bundle of papers, part of the estate of one Henry Cort, into the care of the elderly Matthew Braddock.  And it is Braddock who narrates his story first as a preface to those of Cort and Stone that he finds in the documents.

Braddock tells of his involvement in the events of 1909 when as a young reporter he was employed by Stone’s widow, Elizabeth, a woman he finds both attractive and intimidating,  to compile a biography of the deceased.  Except the job turns out to be much more than that; intrigue and danger abound as well as shady characters like Henry Cort.

Cort’s narrative comes next and concerns his time as a young man in Paris in 1890, having been recruited as an unofficial agent of HM Government.  This brings him into contact with John Stone just as the international industrialist is first introduced to Elizabeth, an exiled Hungarian countess who holds influential salons in the French capital.  A crisis emerges and Cort finds it is up to him to save the day.

The third narrative takes the reader back further, to 1867 in Venice where a young John Stone arrives as part of a year’s travelling.  The city, then a mere backwater, exerts an enervating hold on many who wash up there, but not Stone who is beginning to put his business ideas into practice while engaging in a dangerous affair.

The stories have resonance in that each feature a young man pursuing a goal, confident he is control of events, while others in the background are trying to manipulate or use him for their own hidden ends.  The similarities of Braddock, Cort and Stone require a clear mind to be kept on whose story is whose.  In each period the historical, political and economic context is detailed and rings true.

Each narrative alone would make a decent novel.  Combined subtly and intriguingly, and topped off with an ingenious denouement, they make for a richly satisfying book – for those who have the time and patience to read the 600 pages with sufficient care (or like this reader, have the foresight to make notes of significant names, dates, linkages and potentially key events).