The Plato Papers: A Prophecy

By Peter Ackroyd

Book Overview

From the imagination of one of the most brilliant writers of our time and bestselling author of The Life of Thomas More , a novel that playfully imagines how the "modern" era might appear to a thinker... This description may be from another edition of this product.

• Format: Hardcover
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0385497687
• ISBN13: 9780385497688
• Release Date: January 2000
• Publisher: Nan A. Talese
• Length: 192 Pages
• Weight: 0.55 lbs.
• Dimensions: 8.3" x 0.8" x 5.5"

Customer Reviews

For lovers of humor!

This short book (took me less than two hours to read) is a riot! I am partial to Ackroyd's work, and this one is a keeper. It has ingredients of a more benign 1984 or Brave New World. But - it is mainly a tongue-in-cheek look at how the few relics they have found can be totally misinterpreted. Plato is also working on a lexicon of Mouldwarp words. Those sections alone are worth the price of admission. The used prices are reasonable enough to pick up a copy of this.

Satirical gem

This short book, largely in the form of Socratic dialagues, is jam-packed with powerful satire. Set in the distant future, it reminds us that every age, indeed every generation, has always been convinced it was something special, that it alone had finally sussed out the universe (more or less), and that their ancestors must've been feeble-minded half-wits not to have seen what is so obvious to them. I found it an excellent antidote to the implicit universal view that we've just reached the zenith of significance and sophistication, just because we happen to be alive in this era. (This view is like the Anthropic Principle applied to history; the book punctures it sweetly and efficiently.)The laughs point both ways - how wrong the "past" (present) age was about the world, but also how wrong the "present" (future) age is about its understanding of the "past" (present) age. The interpretations from the future of the few surviving fragments of the present age in the far future are slyly hilarious, while the "our ancestors must've been chuckleheads to believe THAT" philosophy (that we would apply to the ancients' geocentric astronomy, for instance) is applied with great effect to some of the foundations of our current world-view.There are echoes of Ackroyd's theories about personality of place as expressed in his London: A Biography, Plato's philosphy and Socrates' life, and a poetry of perspective. The identity and future interpretation of the handful of cultural artifacts from our era that survive is one of the incidental joys of this work, I'll just hint at one of the early ones: that classic comedy, The Origin of Species, by Charles Dickens...Highly Recommended!

Life Beyound Us

I can think of no real words to describe this novel, but I was drawn to the depth of the writing. Even the shortest sentence would provoke a kind of moral battle of the mind. When some say it was confusing, they are right in a way, but beyound the confusion there was really a simpicity to all the philosophy being said. When you thought about it, suddenly the world would seem clearer. I highly reccommend this novel to anyone.

OUTSTANDING

What a tour-de-force! funny, thought-provoking, muscular. Neither philosophy nor sci-fi: rather a multi-dimensional mirror held up to our faces, ostensibly from the year 3700. There are discrepancies - one reader mentioned time and sexes - but these do not mar the thinking, nor the action. Perhaps it is rather geared towards the English reader. Being one of those, I recognised several more specifically English, or even London references, jokes and quizzes, which, as a recently departed Londoner, I relished. All the same, even if you've never set foot in England you can find enjoyment in this book. It reminded me of a well-risen soufflé: light, seemingly insubstantial, rather clever, rarely perfect, becoming more rich in the middle, and at the end of it, you are full and smiling with pleasure, and thinking widely. This book leads you through many layers: satire of "clever dons", of the New Age movement's wilder claims, it touches also, with fun and ultimate compassion, on our relationship with the past, with place, with ourselves...Read it slowly enough to discover them, and fast enough to keep the pace and enjoy the wit. Just a note: Plato's wild speculations in the first half of the book remind me of my old Greek tutor at Oxford, who would go on similar flights of fancy about the Athenian past ("let's decide, for one moment, there was an Athenian league...". It was fun, it developed the imagination and different ways of thinking and looking at reality, and it made us realise that, really, we probably understand very little of our ancestors. The Plato Papers does much the same.I won't extend too much time to the appallingly personal crits I read here ("pompous british biographer"; "odd little book"- funny, that's exactly what Dr Johnson said about Tristram Shandy. No-one reads Dr Johnson these days but plenty read Tristram Shandy)- everyone is entitled to his opinion, even if it is xenophobic and unexplained. Enough to say- give it a try, you might loathe it or love it - I hope you will find as much to think about after reading it as I did. Oh, and it'll send you straight back to your Plato, if you had squeezed it out of your bedside table. Some readers deplored it was too short: Plato wrote very short books and packed them. Long does not always mean more substantial.

Insightful!

Reading the Plato Papers was my first time reading any of Ackroyd's works--and now I am sure to read more. His insight into the future was exciting to read and the novel was quite the page-turner. The parallel to the life of Plato himself made the novel all the more interesting--it is wonderfully scribed. I would recommend that anyone read this novel--it is brilliant.