The Plato Papers
Peter Ackroyd
Chatto & Windus, h/b, 140pp, £12.99 (now in paperback)
Review by David Kendall
Peter Ackroyd's latest 'novel' (no longer than a novella) gives us the world, or rather the City of London, of AD3700. In common with most sci-fi tales of the future, the population has been drastically reduced by some cataclysm, and words and etiquette from the reader's present are reinterpreted by the people of the future. Plus there are a few pleasant anachronisms thrown in, the 'Feast of Gog', for example, to give the future the bones of the past.
The Plato Papers doesn't read like you're average novel, the unknown narrator says:
'I intend to conjure up a likeness of Plato, the great orator of London... I will practice the art of selection; like the displays of our actors continually before us, some events will be presented on a grand scale and others diminished.'
And it does feel as if you are listening to a conjuration of disembodied voices.
The Plato Papers unfolds through Plato's orations, and dialogues between his contemporaries. It is the past that concerns Plato and it is his delving into the past that brings both ridicule and censure down upon him. Despite Plato's determination to discover the 'truth' about the past, particularly the time known as Mouldwarp AD1500 - AD 2300 he is constantly way off the mark. In one of his dialogues he discusses the work of Charles Dickens and his one surviving novel The Origin of the Species - a 'comic masterpiece'. The Plato Papers is played for laughs, there are a hundred in-jokes and references that will raise a smile but I laughed a lot more reading Moorcock's Dancers at the End of Time.
For a time, Plato is content to be simply an orator dependent on what future archaeologists bring him but Plato has always felt out of place/time. As a child he had a fear that the contented residents of The Present do not possess. It is that fear that drives him to a faith in the past. It is hard not to see Ackroyd represented in the figure of Plato, who talks Dr Dee-like with his Soul, who speaks of the Mouldwarp age as a time when people did not see the light within themselves, and perhaps most overtly when Plato tries to convince London's future inhabitants that they must not believe their reality is the only one; that people in the past have always thought that their way was the best.
'The people of Mouldwarp did not know why they believed in science. They knew only that it was absurd not to believe.'
Plato takes the ultimate step, and leaves the protection of his Soul to journey directly into the Age of Mouldwarp. The tales he brings back disturb the citizens. His new conviction lacks the charm of his previous performances. As Plato gives more 'accurate' accounts his audience grow more and more uneasy and eventually he is brought to trial.
As far as using the future to comment on the present and dish out a whole swathe of cultural and literary references, I still go for the Moorcock quartet but The Plato Papers, with its quirky structure and beguiling dialogues, will delight Ackroyd fans and those looking for something a bit different.