Arcadia / Iain Pears, 510 pp.

I loved this author's An Instance of the Fingerpost, a wonderful  Restoration-era mystery filled with intricate plot twists and great character development.  And his The Dream of Scipio is one of my all-time favorites, so I was looking forward to Arcadia.

I'm happy to say I wasn't disappointed.  Arcadia is among other things, the story of Anterwold, a fantasy world created by Oxford academic Henry Lytten, old friend of Tolkien and C.S. Lewis.  At least, Lytten thought it was merely a fantasy world until his cat-sitter, 15-year-old Rose, reports having met a Lytten counterpart in a land very much like Arcadia, accessed through a rusted pergola in Lytten's basement.  And then there is Angela, Lytten's old friend from his days in WWII British intelligence, who comes from where, exactly?  How is it that she speaks scores of languages fluently, anyway?

Pears sets up a delightful narrative echo chamber in which the reader never quite knows where, or when, it is, but with notes of Shakespeare, Orwell, the Bible, as well as Tolkien and Lewis, it almost doesn't matter.  Cerebral, sly, dry, and playful, Arcadia has the added benefit of not taking itself and its complicated narrative-about-narrative too seriously.  Because I am attempting to write a snide-free review, I will not name those authors, specializing in time travel and alternate universes, guilty of that particular sin; perhaps it's no coincidence that Pears doesn't mention them either?