There the political differences of the inhabitants - urban and pastoral, rich and poor, insider and outsider - are kept in what-should-be-eternal balance by a ritual known as the Abasement. When Henry’s not working for the British government flushing out Russian spies, he meets with an Inklings-like group of popular-fiction fans at a local pub and reads aloud from his rapidly accumulating notes for the tale of a sociologically believable fantasy realm called Anterwold. With one foot set in the 1960s, the novel’s central character, Henry Lytten, is an Oxford fellow with a fondness for the fantasy landscapes of local celebrities like C. S. With a nod to Philip Sidney (and Tom Stoppard), Pears unreels a series of stories that travel in several directions at once: from past to future, from future to past, and from fictive to actual and back again.

They are equally “real” and equally “unreal” - take your pick. And the answer might well be: no difference at all. What’s the difference between all these systems of order, knowledge and storytelling? the attentive reader might ask. Now, almost 20 years later, Pears’s latest novel presents a complexly interwoven series of narrative entanglements that stretch across time, alternate universes and at least several textual realities - from Elizabethan pastoral romance and multiple universe theory to a Narnia-like fantasy world and Cold War international intrigue. After nearly 700 pages of deposition, when the guilty are finally sorted from the hard-to-call-innocent, many readers will understandably have already lost track of their scorecards. His best-known novel, “An Instance of the Fingerpost,” explored a 17th-century Oxford murder and its aftermath through the memoirs of four unreliable narrators, each hotly disputing the others’ versions of reality, science, religion and justice. Nobody can tangle a text like Iain Pears.

An instance of the fingerpost