Chris Scott

Born in Hull, Yorkshire, England, he was educated at the University of Hull (B.A., 1966), Manchester University (M.A., 1967), and then at the University of Pennsylvania. After a period of teaching at York University, Toronto, he moved to a small town north of Kingston.

He became a Canadian citizen in 1975, and resided on a farm in Lanark County, Ontario during much of his writing career. He is noted for his mixture of genre literature with experimental fiction.

Scott unleashed his formidable literary learning in Bartleby (1971), an anti-novel, in which the reader is guided by a Shandean narrator through a series of intricate, clever literary parodies. Much of the novel turns on literary puns and references. To catch a spy (1978) takes the delicate convolutions of the Le Carré thriller a step further—towards a world in which the doubleness of agents is both assumed and unprovable. The plot is a fictional response to the Burgess-MacLean-Philby spy scandals of the Cold War years that moves towards a meditation on the necessity of living with borrowed faiths and contingent truths in the face of an inscrutable divinity.

Antichthon (1982), a historical novel, continues where the spy novel left off, exploring the universal suspicion in the Renaissance world of casuistry and the Inquisition in which Giordano Bruno is burnt as a heretic. Like the previous novel, it centres on a ‘fictional’ death, whose reality is called into question, making truth itself the subtlest corrosive in a corrupt world. Scott's concept of the suppleness of truth underlies the vitality he has brought to two otherwise hackneyed genres—the espionage novel and the historical novel.

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