Vol. 3, Number 2	Summer 2000

 

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At fewer than 200 pages, The Plato Papers is a rather unassuming volume. But looks can be deceiving. Author Peter Ackroyd, perhaps best known for his monumental biographies of Charles Dickens, William Blake, T. S. Eliot, and Thomas More, is also a prolific novelist and historian: The Plato Papers makes this versatility immediately evident, being itself an amalgam of several different genres-philosophical dialogue, satire, admonitory parable, and science fiction-that lives up to its prophetic claims. In 55 very short chapters this compact novel, for all its quirkiness, makes the reader think hard about the world in which we live-without ever lapsing into pedantry.

The novel's basic premise is simple: a human civilization in the distant future examines-and misinterprets-the past. Ackroyd manages to execute this concept with insight and wit, forcing the present-day reader to reexamine his own preconceived notions about both past and present. Set in thirty-eighth-century London, the novel's central figure is a man named Plato, the city's appointed orator. Not surprisingly, he is a Socrates-like figure, donning his orator's mask to deliver wonder-inducing public lectures on the history of humankind in the markets and squares of the city. Plato is especially intrigued by our era, which he dubs "Mouldwarp"; it lasted from 1500 until 2300 A.D., when the sun went out and Plato's age, Witspell, began.

Working only with his own logic and the few artifacts that survive from the age of Mouldwarp, Plato reconstructs life in twentieth-century London as he imagines it must have been. He concludes, for instance, that an "organ grinder" was some type of butcher and that On the Origin of Species was a comic masterpiece by Charles Dickens. Ackroyd is ingenious in creating these misguided inferences, deftly balancing absurdity with genuine insight. Plato's interpretations are simultaneously right and wrong; though factually erroneous, they force us to ponder the implications of things we have heretofore taken for granted. For instance, Plato envisions the current Internet phenomenon as the downfall of Mouldwarp society, describing "the despair engendered by the cult of webs and nets which spread among the people in those final years... They seem to have worn these dismal garments as a form of enslavement as well as worship, as if their own darkness might thereby be covered and concealed."

When the novel begins, Plato is in the process of compiling a glossary of Mouldwarp terms; several chapters consist entirely of these entries, which are occasionally pat but for the most part marvelously inventive. In the tradition of acclaimed science fiction visionaries such as Ray Bradbury and Aldous Huxley, Ackroyd manages to distance himself from his own society enough to imagine how it would seem to an outsider, provoking the reader to wonder if his own preconceived notions about ancient societies are as valid as they seem. For instance, Plato defines "town crier" as "an official who took on the woes of a town, or district, and engaged in ritual weeping to ensure the maintenance of harmony"; "fibre optic," meanwhile, is "a coarse material woven out of eyes, worn by the high priests of the mechanical age in order to instill terror among the populace." Many of these definitions are purely tongue-in-cheek comic, as in this entry for "third world": "unknown. The home of the third person? Hence the location of the third degree? Doubtful." However, the best of these are diamonds in the rough-if we look past the facetious exterior, we catch glints of hard, incisive truth about the world in which we live, as in this definition of a stopwatch: "a group of trained observers chosen to measure the pace of human affairs and to intervene if there were any signs of delay. There seems to have been a general delight in speed and efficiency for their own sake, with the attendant fear that the world might lose its velocity or even stop altogether."

Because the novel is organized into such short, stylistically unusual chapters, it is less a narrative than a collection of seemingly disparate and incomplete fragments; much as Plato must piece together artifacts from our time to form some sort of coherent whole, so too must the reader puzzle over the real nature of Plato's world. We are given hints: Plato's age began, apparently, after a global holocaust, and the resulting civilization has turned away from science and technology. Ackroyd's Londoners are tall and willowy, with white eyes, and they radiate the light that illuminates their world, sunless since the end of the Age of Mouldwarp. The London they inhabit, which is watched over by "angels," seems to be a sort of timeless Platonic Utopia.

Despite the novel's piecemeal approach, a main storyline does eventually emerge. Over the course of a series of dialogues with his soul, which take the form of actual Platonic dialogues ("Soul: 'Sometimes, you know, I worry about you.' Plato: 'Why?' Soul: 'You have no perspective'"), a previously confident Plato begins to doubt that his interpretations of the past are correct. Eventually, in a section labeled "The Journey of Plato to the Underworld," he descends into a vast cavern, inside of which exists twentieth-century London. Plato wanders unseen through our world, marveling at the reality of this long-imagined society. He observes how misguided its members are: "their sky was the roof of a cave, but for them it was the threshold of the universe. I was walking among the blind."

Anyone who has read The Republic will recognize that the journey of Ackroyd's Plato is a fresh rendition of the allegory of the cave. The original Plato used this allegory to illustrate the plight of the unenlightened in society: prisoners chained in a dark underground cave, able to see only shadows of the real world as they are cast upon the walls by a great fire. In Ackroyd's brilliant adaptation of this allegory, twentieth-century society as a whole constitutes the unenlightened, and our own sun is the fire in the cave, as noted here by Plato: "It was growing warmer and I noticed that in the glowing light my body cast a strange shape upon the ground. It was called a shadow, or a wraith created by the false light of their sun." Ackroyd imagines time itself as the chains tying the hapless prisoners to life in the cave: "There was even a band of time strapped to their wrists, like a manacle binding them to life in the cave."

Plato returns from the cave to tell the people of Witspell of his disconcerting findings. His discovery that Mouldwarp differs so greatly from his conception of it spurs him to scrutinize his own civilization. Eventually, like Socrates, he is put on trial by his fellow citizens for troubling the spirits of the city's young people. Soon after, he is exiled, despite his avowal that free thought can and should go hand-in-hand with religious orthodoxy: "I have never spoken evil of the angels. I have never questioned the sanctity of mazes and mirrors. I have never defied the hierarchy of colours."

The Plato Papers ultimately leaves us with questions, not answers. What are we to make of Ackroyd's retooling of the cave allegory? Near the end of the novel, Plato begins to suspect that the two civilizations are not as distant from each other as he first thought. He conjectures that perhaps we are all sharing the same geography, invisible to each other: "I know this: our world and their world are intermingled." Perhaps Ackroyd is offering a ray of hope in his otherwise dismal portrait of modern existence, a hint that we are capable of reaching enlightenment. Even so, we must ask ourselves what Ackroyd's conception of enlightenment entails. In the allegory of the cave, the original Plato maintains that, when the enlightened few who have left the cave return to it and impart their knowledge to the prisoners, they will be mocked mercilessly. In Ackroyd's reworking, Plato returns to Witspell to tell of his newfound wisdom only to be derided by its inhabitants, perhaps suggesting that even they, for all of their flip remarks about the ignorance of the citizens of Mouldwarp, are not truly wise.

Near the end of the novel, at his trial, Plato describes his mission: "I am simply asking you to question and, perhaps, to see the world in different ways." Ackroyd's goal, I suspect, is identical-and, in this little book, he succeeds.