Stone's Fall

The structure of Iain Pears' Stone's Fall will be familiar to anyone acquainted with his earlier An Instance of the Fingerpost: three male narrators tell stories which, in some way, touch on industrialist John Stone, Lord Ravenscliff, and his wife, a mysterious Hungarian named Elizabeth. The title presents us with what is supposedly the mystery--how could Stone accidentally topple out of a window when he was afraid of heights?--but it also turns out to be a pun, for Stone's fall turns out to be as moral as it is physical.   To get to that point, we go back in time.  The novel begins in 1953, with the first narrator, Braddock, attending Elizabeth's funeral; it then jumps back to 1909, as Braddock, then a struggling journalist and would-be Socialist, is asked to investigate both the mysterious child mentioned in Stone's will and the circumstances of his "fall"; then back to 1900, as elite spy Henry Cort reminisces about the time he stopped several European powers from destroying the British Empire, an enterprise that involves both Stone and Elizabeth; and then, finally, to 1863, as Stone himself tells the story of his adulterous affair with Louise Cort (Henry's mother).  As we move through the narrative layers, it becomes clearer that Stone's "fall" is not, after all, a singular event...

As a neo-Victorian novel, Stone's Fall turns out to be rooted (intentionally or otherwise) in some very recognizable Victorian traditions.  Without being a retelling of any particular novel, it owes much to the worlds of Trollope's The Way We Live Now and Dickens' Little Dorrit--crossed with Frankenstein.  (That last is actually very Victorian: Frankenstein imagery crops up frequently to describe the threat posed by the working classes.)  Unlike one of Scott's historical novels, in which modernity clashes with some outdated cultural formation, Stone's Fall drops us directly into the era of industrial capitalism, in which power is money. Characters live and prosper only insofar as they grasp this salient fact. And money is both liquid and neutral.  Thus, Stone cheerfully builds torpedoes for England and any other nation that can pay his bill; or, as he says to Henry Cort, "'It is the task of a company to generate capital.  That is its beginning and its end, and it is foolish and sentimental to apply morality to it, let alone patriotism'" (286).  Nations impose "restraints" on companies, which those companies then in turn "strain forever" to undermine and subvert--all in the name of "profits" (287).  Stone's ideals are not, in other words, those of Carlyle's Captains of Industry, let alone of Dinah Craik's John Halifax.  But if companies may function in this fashion, Stone ultimately cannot.  Despite his habit of using "I" as a convenient shortcut for discussing his immensely complicated international empire, Stone runs abruptly aground when it comes to intimate relationships.  Erotic desire, as Elizabeth successfully demonstrates in her career as a well-paid mistress, can be successfully managed and turned to profit by anyone willing to separate affect from sex; love, however, is the spanner in the capitalist works.  Unlike the ostensible neutrality of Stone's capitalist maneuverings, love demands reciprocity, self-forgetfulness, an awareness of consequences.  Where the novel's capitalism is relentlessly global, love turns out to be entirely local.  And Stone may not be much of a Christian, but love forces him to recognize his "sins" (593).   Ironically enough, Stone's love for Elizabeth, far from being personally redemptive, ultimately ejects him from his own capitalist Eden of pure profit-driven exchange. 

But this love-glitch is only part of the problem.  Invoking Frankenstein, Braddock tells Henry Cort that Stone's "companies had come alive; he had created a monster, and it was acting in its own interests, no longer taking orders" (230).  Although this is, in fact, clearly part of Stone's problem, Braddock nevertheless gets the answer to the mystery wrong--as any reader should guess, seeing as how his explanation comes about halfway through a nearly six-hundred page novel--and that's part of the more general problem.  Braddock, Cort, and even Stone are all given to believing in their own stories, until it is too late; they are first-person narrators who aspire to omniscience.  (This even though some of them, like Cort the master spy, argue that their lives subvert all the conventions of the thriller genre.  Cort is up on the relevant plot elements, but miscalculates anyway.)  The moment a character believes s/he not only grasps the situation, but also can fully manipulate it, s/he is lost.  As morals go, this one is perfectly Victorian.  This is true of supporting characters as well: one man dies because, too confident, he fails to realize that he's caught up in multiple plots, while Louise Cort turns out to be a kind of Jane Eyre parody, a woman who makes her way up the food chain on the power of Gothic narrative.   The only character who succeeds is the protean Elizabeth, whose career is a rather bleaker version of Becky Sharp's--but, as far as the reader can tell, she succeeds in part by abandoning Stone's world altogether, investing the entirety of her fortune in orphanages "run on the very latest humanitarian principles" (5). Significantly, though, Elizabeth does not know and never tries to discover her true origins, and this ignorance keeps her functional.