In A.D. 3700, 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. Particularly fascinated with the dark and confused epoch known as the Age of Mouldwarp, stretching from A.D. 1500 to A.D. 2300, Plato discourses on its extraordinary figures and customs 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 Waste Land; and Charles Dickens's greatest novel, The Origin of Species. And then there's E.A. Poe--or rather, Poet: The eminence and status of the author are not in doubt. The name, for example, was not difficult to interpret. Poe is an abbreviation of Poet, and by common consent the rest was deciphered: E. A. Poe = Eminent American Poet. It seems clear enough that the writers of America enjoyed a blessed anonymity, even in the Age of Mouldwarp. The word 'poet' is known to all of us, but as there are no chants or hymns in 'Tales and Histories' we believe the term was applied indiscriminately to all writers of that civilisation. Plato also elaborates on the era's strange rites and rituals, including "the cult of webs and nets" that apparently covered and enslaved the population. But then in the midst of these brilliant, precise public performances, he begins a dialogue with his soul. Doubt begins to creep in (Is the past really past? And are the rituals of the present so superior?), leading him on a fateful journey.

The Plato Papers is an extraordinary novel. As with the best of Peter Ackroyd's fiction, it treads a thin line between fantasy and biography, the genre he so elegantly mastered in his now classic studies Dickens, T.S. Eliot, and The Life of Thomas More. Wise and salutary, it is a wonderfully observed satire of misprision and the arrogance of philosophical certainty. --Jerry Brotton

From Publishers Weekly
Is each century doomed to misinterpret previous ones? That's the central question of Ackroyd's new book, more a Swiftian compendium of social folly than a novel, satirizing many of today's intellectual shibboleths. In the year 3700, a public orator named Plato educates the masses about the important texts and beliefs of previous ages. It's an imperfect archeology, though, since destroyed texts and lost information cause him to attribute On the Origin of Species not to Charles Darwin, but to Charles Dickens, placing that volume in Dickens's line of melodramatic or romantic novels. He also puzzles over the computer age, rueing the "despair engendered by the cult of webs and nets which spread among the people" and cites Edgar Allan Poe's Tales and Histories as "the unique record of a lost race." Eventually, Plato begins to suspect that his knowledge about earlier culture is fundamentally incorrect, but as he moves beyond generally accepted assumptions, he runs afoul of those in power. He's placed on trial and is forced to defend himself against accusations of "corrupting the young by spinning lies and fables." Biographer (The Life of Thomas More) and novelist (Chatterton) Ackroyd displays his encyclopedic knowledge of world literature in this philosophical satire, rendering this effort witty and cerebral. The humor is especially sharp in the sections listing common words and phrases from centuries before, and their wildly creative definitions: "pedestrian: one who journeyed on foot; used as a term of abuse, as in 'this is a very pedestrian plot.'" Or "yellow fever: the fear of colour." Toward the end of the book, Ackroyd creates a sense of how Plato's search for knowledge affects him as an individual, a welcome development in keeping the plot connected to the experimental narrative. Other elements are by turns highly intellectual, jokey, lofty and fragmented, but Ackroyd delivers a constant stream of surprising linguistic, satiric twists that many armchair cultural theorists will relish. (Jan.) Copyright 1999 Reed Business Information, Inc.

From Library Journal
No, not that Plato. This is the 37th-century orator and scholar from London, who regularly regales his audiences with reports from the Age of Mouldwarp (c. 1500-2300); though fervent in his research, Plato makes some incorrect assumptions due to limited historical evidence--e.g., he believes Darwin's The Origin of Species is a comic novel. Plato also defends the city's "guardians" in their views of Mouldwarp as a soulless society with no redeeming value, until he takes a metaphysical journey to that time. There he finds an understanding that unnerves his contemporaries so much that he is charged with spinning lies and banished from the city. The versatile Ackroyd (The Life of Thomas More) has fun particularly deconstructing the 20th century through decidedly different eyes, and the novel can be enjoyed on that somewhat amusing level. The author, however, seems to be reaching for some larger statement (futile searches for "truth," the commonality of man through the ages?) that was lost on this reviewer. A likable enough book, though it will appeal more to the brain than to the heart. For larger collections.-Marc A. Kloszewski, Indiana Free Lib., PA Copyright 2000 Reed Business Information, Inc.

The New York Times Book Review, John Sutherland
The most enjoyable section of the book is the opening one, which is replete with jokes--some extremely funny.

From Kirkus Reviews
The intellectual legacy of Platonic philosophy takes on entertaining new life in this sophisticated and very funny fable by the protean British author (The Life of Thomas More, 1998, etc.). Prefatory quotations from various fictional scholarly sources inform us that the human race has reached the year a.d. 3700, despite the quenching of the world's ``light'' (due to nuclear catastrophe?) centuries ago, followed by a period of enlightenment (The Age of Witspell''). The setting is London, where a great orator'' named Plato dispenses wisdom, eons after his namesake flourished in Athens (during ``The Age of Orpheus''). In 55 brief chapters, Ackroyd juxtaposes brief conversations between Plato and his (feminine) soul and with his several admiring disciples (who discuss him, in separate chapters), with the great man's ``exequies'' on evidence of earlier civilizations' mistakes (an exhumed copy of Poe's stories is believed to be ``the unique record of a lost race'' sunk in paranoia and depression; surviving fragmentary texts reveal the existence of a prophetic black singer named George Eliot and ``a clown or buffoon who was billed as Sigmund Freud''), and excerpts from Plato's ``glossary'' of antiquities (``rock music'' is presumed to denote ``the sound of old stones''). Fortunately, this slim book doesn't settle for elegant gags. Plato's fascination with the alien cultures of the past inspires him to undertake a ``Journey to the Underworld,'' during which he discovers the parallel existence (beneath Witspell) of `' Mouldwarp'' (our own civilization, supposedly ended when ``the light'' disappeared). The result is his trial, ostensibly for corrupting the young; in reality, for having introduced uncertainty into a world smugly convinced that it knows itself, and thus knows all. A strikingly imaginative and provocative cautionary tale that makes superb use of Ackroyd's formidable erudition. One of his most satisfying books. -- Copyright ©1999, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.

Review
"Richly revealing. . . . Unlike anything else Peter Ackroyd has written. . . . A jeu d'esprit."


"A lively tale and an invigorating meditation on the changelessness, after no matter how many eons, of human nature."


"A serious divertissement, a brilliant fabulation that is the product of a playful, engaged, and well-stocked mind."


"A little book that raises some big questions. . . . You can finish it in a couple of hours. But if you read it carefully, you'll be thinking about it for days."


"Peter Ackroyd is a visionary, as The Plato Papers makes clear. This is one of the oddest but most important and original novels to appear in many years. This masterpiece of contemporary writing will thrill and entertain readers for years to come, but it will do more than that: it will enlarge their vision, stimulating organs long forgotten and never known."
--Jay Parini, author of The Last Station and Robert Frost: A Life

"What makes The Plato Papers notable is not its fantastic invention but its intelligence...Excellently written...with a truly Socratic curiosity, making The Plato Papers a philosophical good read."
--Malcolm Bradbury, Financial Times

"An invigorating mixture of satire, history, philosophy, morality, and linguistic investigation...it's like T.S. Eliot on speed meets Martian poetry but with better jokes."
--Michele Robert, The Times

"Articulate, comic, wise, delicate, melancholy, exquisite. It simultaneously deconstructs the story of the past and builds its own myth. In short, this is a carefully pulsed breath of a book, with an impact that sneaks into one's dreams."
--John Clute, The Independent


"A fantastic invention--excellently written."--Malcolm Bradbury -->

Review
"Richly revealing. . . . Unlike anything else Peter Ackroyd has written. . . . A jeu d'esprit."


"A lively tale and an invigorating meditation on the changelessness, after no matter how many eons, of human nature."


"A serious divertissement, a brilliant fabulation that is the product of a playful, engaged, and well-stocked mind."


"A little book that raises some big questions. . . . You can finish it in a couple of hours. But if you read it carefully, you'll be thinking about it for days."


"Peter Ackroyd is a visionary, as The Plato Papers makes clear. This is one of the oddest but most important and original novels to appear in many years. This masterpiece of contemporary writing will thrill and entertain readers for years to come, but it will do more than that: it will enlarge their vision, stimulating organs long forgotten and never known."
--Jay Parini, author of The Last Station and Robert Frost: A Life

"What makes The Plato Papers notable is not its fantastic invention but its intelligence...Excellently written...with a truly Socratic curiosity, making The Plato Papers a philosophical good read."
--Malcolm Bradbury, Financial Times

"An invigorating mixture of satire, history, philosophy, morality, and linguistic investigation...it's like T.S. Eliot on speed meets Martian poetry but with better jokes."
--Michele Robert, The Times

"Articulate, comic, wise, delicate, melancholy, exquisite. It simultaneously deconstructs the story of the past and builds its own myth. In short, this is a carefully pulsed breath of a book, with an impact that sneaks into one's dreams."
--John Clute, The Independent


"A fantastic invention--excellently written."--Malcolm Bradbury -->

Book Description
"Ackroyd has written what we always knew that he alone could produce: a timeless literary masterpiece....This is a marvelous fable for our times. It is funny, wise, and strange...In the 18th century, Dean Swift cast a scorching searchlight on his own times by isolating their follies in imagined lands to which Gulliver made his imaginary travels. Ackroyd has pulled off a similar feat of travel in time and imagination."
--A.N. Wilson, Daily Mail

At the turn of the thirty-eighth century, London's greatest orator, Plato, regularly delivers bravura public lectures on the long, tumultuous history of what is now a tranquil city. Plato focuses particularly on the obscured and confusing era that began in A.D. 1500, which he calls the Age of Mouldwarp. Basing his work on an incomplete archaeological record, Plato pieces scraps of evidence together into a semicoherent whole. He lectures on the clown Sigmund Freud's comic masterpiece, Jokes and Their Relation to the Unconscious, and on the prolific author Charles D.'s greatest novel, The Origin of Species. And he explores the confusing rituals of Mouldwarp, including the cult of webs and nets that covered and enslaved the population.

In approximately A.D. 2300, when the sun went out and the planet fell into a thousand years of darkness, the Age of Mouldwarp came to a close, and the dark Age of Witspell began. But this epoch holds little interest for Plato, and in the midst of his public performances he begins a dialogue with his soul that leads him closer to the citizens of Mouldwarp than any strict historical inquiry might allow.

As with the best of Ackroyd's fiction, The Plato Papers treads a thin line between fantasy and biography, the genre of which Ackroyd is a heralded master. It is at once remarkably funny and erudite, a brilliant and entertaining portrayal of the ways in which the future is imagined, the present absorbed, and the past misrepresented. The Plato Papers is a tour de force of wisdom and wit that enlists all of Ackroyd's most wonderful skills and talents in a true masterpiece, brimming with delights and insights.


THE PLATO PAPERS, as with the best of Ackroyd's fiction, treads a thin line between fantasy and biography, the genre of which Ackroyd is a heralded master. It is at once remarkably funny and erudite, a wise and entertaining portrayal of the ways in which the past is misrepresented. Perfectly timed for the year 2000 as we imagine millennia beyond our own, "this masterpiece of contemporary writing will entertain readers for years to come" (Jay Parini, author of The Last Station). -->


From the Inside Flap
"Ackroyd has written what we always knew that he alone could produce: a timeless literary masterpiece....This is a marvelous fable for our times. It is funny, wise, and strange...In the 18th century, Dean Swift cast a scorching searchlight on his own times by isolating their follies in imagined lands to which Gulliver made his imaginary travels. Ackroyd has pulled off a similar feat of travel in time and imagination."
--A.N. Wilson, Daily Mail

At the turn of the thirty-eighth century, London's greatest orator, Plato, regularly delivers bravura public lectures on the long, tumultuous history of what is now a tranquil city. Plato focuses particularly on the obscured and confusing era that began in A.D. 1500, which he calls the Age of Mouldwarp. Basing his work on an incomplete archaeological record, Plato pieces scraps of evidence together into a semicoherent whole. He lectures on the clown Sigmund Freud's comic masterpiece, Jokes and Their Relation to the Unconscious, and on the prolific author Charles D.'s greatest novel, The Origin of Species. And he explores the confusing rituals of Mouldwarp, including the cult of webs and nets that covered and enslaved the population.

In approximately A.D. 2300, when the sun went out and the planet fell into a thousand years of darkness, the Age of Mouldwarp came to a close, and the dark Age of Witspell began. But this epoch holds little interest for Plato, and in the midst of his public performances he begins a dialogue with his soul that leads him closer to the citizens of Mouldwarp than any strict historical inquiry might allow.

As with the best of Ackroyd's fiction, The Plato Papers treads a thin line between fantasy and biography, the genre of which Ackroyd is a heralded master. It is at once remarkably funny and erudite, a brilliant and entertaining portrayal of the ways in which the future is imagined, the present absorbed, and the past misrepresented. The Plato Papers is a tour de force of wisdom and wit that enlists all of Ackroyd's most wonderful skills and talents in a true masterpiece, brimming with delights and insights.


THE PLATO PAPERS, as with the best of Ackroyd's fiction, treads a thin line between fantasy and biography, the genre of which Ackroyd is a heralded master. It is at once remarkably funny and erudite, a wise and entertaining portrayal of the ways in which the past is misrepresented. Perfectly timed for the year 2000 as we imagine millennia beyond our own, "this masterpiece of contemporary writing will entertain readers for years to come" (Jay Parini, author of The Last Station). -->

From the Back Cover
"Richly revealing. . . . Unlike anything else Peter Ackroyd has written. . . . A jeu d'esprit."
--The New York Times Book Review

"A lively tale and an invigorating meditation on the changelessness, after no matter how many eons, of human nature."
--Time

"A serious divertissement, a brilliant fabulation that is the product of a playful, engaged, and well-stocked mind."
--The Boston Globe

"A little book that raises some big questions. . . . You can finish it in a couple of hours. But if you read it carefully, you'll be thinking about it for days."
--Philadelphia Inquirer

"Peter Ackroyd is a visionary, as The Plato Papers makes clear. This is one of the oddest but most important and original novels to appear in many years. This masterpiece of contemporary writing will thrill and entertain readers for years to come, but it will do more than that: it will enlarge their vision, stimulating organs long forgotten and never known."
--Jay Parini, author of The Last Station and Robert Frost: A Life

"What makes The Plato Papers notable is not its fantastic invention but its intelligence...Excellently written...with a truly Socratic curiosity, making The Plato Papers a philosophical good read."
--Malcolm Bradbury, Financial Times

"An invigorating mixture of satire, history, philosophy, morality, and linguistic investigation...it's like T.S. Eliot on speed meets Martian poetry but with better jokes."
--Michele Robert, The Times

"Articulate, comic, wise, delicate, melancholy, exquisite. It simultaneously deconstructs the story of the past and builds its own myth. In short, this is a carefully pulsed breath of a book, with an impact that sneaks into one's dreams."
--John Clute, The Independent


"A fantastic invention--excellently written."--Malcolm Bradbury -->

About the Author
PETER ACKROYD is the award-winning author of the recent national bestseller The Life of Thomas More. His biographies--including T. S. Eliot, Dickens, and Blake--are as prized as his novels, which include Chatterton, Hawksmoor, and, most recently, The Trial of Elizabeth Cree and Milton in America. He lives in London, where he is at work on his next book, London: The Biography, a history of the city.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.
The Lectures and Remarks of Plato on the Condition of Past Ages
--

Sparkler: Wait, Sidonia, wait!

Sidonia: Gladly.

Sparkler: I just saw you in the market. You were standing beneath the city wall, and so I assumed that you were listening to Plato's oration.

Sidonia: Correct in every respect, Sparkler. But I expected to see you there, since you always celebrate the feast of Gog.

Sparkler: I was about to cross the Fleet, and join you, when Madrigal stopped me.

Sidonia: What did he want?

Sparkler: Only something about a parish meeting. But, as a result, I missed Plato's opening remarks. I heard only his ending, when he spoke of his sorrow at the darkness of past ages.

Sidonia: It was all very interesting. There was a period when our ancestors believed that they inhabited a world which revolved around a sun.

Sparkler: Can it be true?

Sidonia: Oh yes. They had been told that they lived upon a spherical planet, moving through some kind of infinite space.

Sparkler: No!

Sidonia: That was their delusion. But it was the Age of Mouldwarp. According to Plato, the whole earth seemed to have been reduced and rolled into a ball until it was small enough to fit their theories.

Sparkler: But surely they must have known--or felt?

Sidonia: They could not have known. For them the sun was a very powerful god. Of course we were all silent for a moment, after Plato had told us this, and then he laughed.

Sparkler: He laughed?

Sidonia: Even when he had taken off the orator's mask, he was still smiling. Then he began to question us. 'Do you consider me to be small? I know that you do. Could you imagine the people of Mouldwarp to be much, much smaller? Their heads were tiny, and their eyes like pinpoints. Do you know,' he said, 'that in the end they believed themselves to be covered by a great net or web?'

Sparkler: Impossible. I never know when Plato is telling the truth.

Sidonia: That is what he enjoys. The game. That is why he is an orator.

Sparkler: We who have known him since childhood--

Sidonia: --never cease to wonder.

Sparkler: But who could be convinced by such wild speculations?

Sidonia: Come and decide for yourself. Walk with me to the white chapel, where he is about to begin his second oration.

FROM THE PUBLISHER

Set 2,2000 years in the future, Peter Ackroyd's imagination new novel is by turns lively, inventive and surprising.

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 Origin of Species by the nineteenth-century novelist Charles Dickens and upon the pantomimic routines of Sigmund Freud. He even provides a glossary of twentieth-century terms, and explains such early myths of creation as super-string theory' and 'relatively'. But then something happens. He has a dream, or a vision, or he goes on a real journey - opinions are divided - and enters a vast underground cavern, where citizens of Mouldwrap London still live.

When Plato returns with stories if this lost world he is put on trial for corrupting the youth by means of lies and fables, since his words have spread consternation among them. Are their lives part of some greater reality? And, if they learn to doubt, perhaps they will be able to recognize a truth beyond that of their own world. All will depend upon the judgment of Plato by his fellow citizens.

FROM THE CRITICS

Richard Dyer - Boston Globe

The Plato Papers' is a serious divertissement, a brilliant fabulation that is the product of a playful, engaged, and well-stocked mind.

Publishers Weekly

Is each century doomed to misinterpret previous ones? That's the central question of Ackroyd's new book, more a Swiftian compendium of social folly than a novel, satirizing many of today's intellectual shibboleths. In the year 3700, a public orator named Plato educates the masses about the important texts and beliefs of previous ages. It's an imperfect archeology, though, since destroyed texts and lost information cause him to attribute On the Origin of Species not to Charles Darwin, but to Charles Dickens, placing that volume in Dickens's line of melodramatic or romantic novels. He also puzzles over the computer age, rueing the "despair engendered by the cult of webs and nets which spread among the people" and cites Edgar Allan Poe's Tales and Histories as "the unique record of a lost race." Eventually, Plato begins to suspect that his knowledge about earlier culture is fundamentally incorrect, but as he moves beyond generally accepted assumptions, he runs afoul of those in power. He's placed on trial and is forced to defend himself against accusations of "corrupting the young by spinning lies and fables." Biographer (The Life of Thomas More) and novelist (Chatterton) Ackroyd displays his encyclopedic knowledge of world literature in this philosophical satire, rendering this effort witty and cerebral. The humor is especially sharp in the sections listing common words and phrases from centuries before, and their wildly creative definitions: "pedestrian: one who journeyed on foot; used as a term of abuse, as in `this is a very pedestrian plot.'" Or "yellow fever: the fear of colour." Toward the end of the book, Ackroyd creates a sense of how Plato's search for knowledge affects him as an individual, a welcome development in keeping the plot connected to the experimental narrative. Other elements are by turns highly intellectual, jokey, lofty and fragmented, but Ackroyd delivers a constant stream of surprising linguistic, satiric twists that many armchair cultural theorists will relish. (Jan.) Copyright 1999 Cahners Business Information.

Library Journal

No, not that Plato. This is the 37th-century orator and scholar from London, who regularly regales his audiences with reports from the Age of Mouldwarp (c. 1500-2300); though fervent in his research, Plato makes some incorrect assumptions due to limited historical evidence--e.g., he believes Darwin's The Origin of Species is a comic novel. Plato also defends the city's "guardians" in their views of Mouldwarp as a soulless society with no redeeming value, until he takes a metaphysical journey to that time. There he finds an understanding that unnerves his contemporaries so much that he is charged with spinning lies and banished from the city. The versatile Ackroyd (The Life of Thomas More) has fun particularly deconstructing the 20th century through decidedly different eyes, and the novel can be enjoyed on that somewhat amusing level. The author, however, seems to be reaching for some larger statement (futile searches for "truth," the commonality of man through the ages?) that was lost on this reviewer. A likable enough book, though it will appeal more to the brain than to the heart. For larger collections.--Marc A. Kloszewski, Indiana Free Lib., PA Copyright 2000 Cahners Business Information.

Time Magazine

If watching its hero jump to false conclusions about the past were the entire point of The Plato Papers, the book would amount to an amusing but decidedly donnish diversion. And for many readers, that would be quite good enough. Plato's attempts to redefine old words are instructively wrong-headed ; "rock music: the sound of old stones"; "telepathy; the suffering caused by 'television.'"

But Ackroyd endows Plato with several intriguing complexities, including, literally a Soul with whom he converses. He senses that many of his historical judgements are mistaken and asks his Soul to tell him what it was really like. Soul refuses: "I am not permitted to dwell on such things. You are becoming. I am being. There is a difference."

Plato's lonely quest for the truth involves some tricky time travelling that takes him back to London during the Mouldwarp era. [The present day.] (Those familiar with Plato's Republic will note with interest that the destination of this journey is a vast cave.) The tales Plato tells on his return do not sit well with the governing authorities, and meets a Socratic fate, put on trial for corrupting the young. By this point, Ackroyd's lively tale has shaded into an invigorating meditation on the changelessness, after no matter how many eons, of human nature and uneasiness with the familiar.

Rubin - The Christian Science Monitor