Amazon.comLike his elegant debut, An Instance of the Fingerpost , Iain Pears"s The Dream of Scipio is an inventive, gloriously detailed historical novel told from multiple viewpoints. But Pears has set himself an additional challenge by spreading his narrators over several centuries: there"s the fifth century French nobleman and bishop, Manlius, a civilized man who has embraced the uncouth Christian faith in order to protect what he holds dear; an 11th-century scholar and troubadour named Olivier de Noyen, the famously ill-fated admirer of a married girl; and Julien Barneuve, an early 20th-century scholar of de Noyen who discovers, through him, a magnificent manuscript of Manlius"s called "The Dream of Scipio." Though all three men come fromthe same small Provencal town, it is this manuscript, derived from the teachings of a wise woman, that links the three narrative threads of Pears"s story. At the heart of The Dream of Scipio and, one suspects, at the heart...