Free Arcadia by Iain Pears

England was a place where what wasn’t done had a force greater than any statute.
    Every now and then a group of boys would pass Lytten’s house on their way to the parks to play football and, on one occasion, Rosie’s utterly uninteresting elder brother had kicked a ball into his garden. He had been too afraid to come himself and Rosie had been sent to get it back. Lytten handed it over gravely and they had talked for some time about the weather, purely for the pleasure in making the boys wait.
    They greeted each other in the street a few days later and talked again; she saw Professor Jenkins stretched out by an open window – a rare concession on his part to fresh air – and stroked him. He warned her that the cat could get nasty, but Jenkins had stood up and become almost flirtatious. Gradually she took to dropping in and, bit by bit, they became as good friends as a fifteen-year-old girl and a fifty-year-old man with little in common can become. Rosie took charge of Jenkins periodically, and Lytten slipped her a little money by way of thanks. He knew she got no pocket money.
    He had given his apparition her coat and face. She was a pretty girl, and her face could be that of a fairy, had it not been for the ridiculous way she had cut her hair. Dreadful coat, though. Red plastic and shiny. Adolescent fashion.
    *
    Lytten’s speciality was Sir Philip Sidney, favourite of Queen Elizabeth, courtier, scholar, poet and man of action. Indeed, he died fighting the Spanish in 1586. A romantic figure; dashing, handsome, well connected, even if his abilities were never as great as he imagined. He desired a fine role in the government but Elizabeth, wise old bird that she was, kept him at arm’s length. The great queen was highly suspicious of extravagance from anyone but herself.
    He compensated for this by writing (or at least starting – henever quite finished anything) the greatest romance in the English language. Almost no one has even heard of it now, which is a pity, because if modern sensibilities are suspended – if you do not care about plot, action, events, morality, structure or pace, if you are not bothered by absurd coincidence or unlikely motivations, if irrelevant digressions of immense length do not weary you – then his Arcadia has many fine qualities. His characters do not do much, it must be admitted; the only event of any real note in the entire book is a seduction, but Sidney cut this out in a later rewriting for fear of being considered vulgar.
    What is left is a rudimentary plot of such absurdity it is best ignored – aristocrats dressed up as peasants when they are not disguising themselves as women, falling in love with other peasants who are also aristocrats in disguise for reasons which really don’t matter too much. Many of Shakespeare’s plots are similar, if a little shorter.
    Besides, for Sidney the plot is only a vehicle for talk. Rather than doing anything, the characters talk in language which is so beautiful that it is difficult to resist. The words create an imaginary landscape of perfection, a soft dream of warm evenings with chuckling streams and dappled sunlight playing through the leaves of a forest.
    Death and threat are there, but only to highlight the perfection of the present. Others have created a similar effect – the scene in Le Grand Meaulnes , where Meaulnes wanders into a Watteauesque party and goes in a daze around an elegant estate, full of beautiful women in silk and men in Pierrot costume. The Venice Carnevale, when all reality is suspended and dreams take over the entire city. All these images and impressions had lodged in Lytten’s youthful mind, a hidden refuge from the reality of a grey industrial land, full of strife and surrounded by the darkening clouds of another war.
    Lytten never allowed his imaginings to overwhelm reality. Sidney was a man he studied; Meaulnes a character in a book; Venice a city he visited. Still, over the years, his recollections