*** DEBUG START ***
*** DEBUG END ***

Act of Oblivion by Robert Harris

by
25 November 2022

Judith Maltby reviews a novel set in the wake of the Restoration

ROBERT HARRIS is the master of the high-quality historical thriller. History is not simply a backdrop in his novels, but an interlocutor with our own age, whether it is the disintegration of the Roman Republic in his Cicero trilogy or (my personal favourite) the corruption and bigotry of late 19th-century France in his gripping novel about the Dreyfus affair, An Officer and a Spy.

He has never tackled a novel set in my own period of academic expertise before; so would I find myself rankled? No worries there: Harris displays an impressive grasp of the historical context without taxing his readers by showing his “workings”.

Act of Oblivion is based on historical events. The success of Charles II’s restoration required a widespread “forgetting” of the actions of many individuals who had served the Cromwellian regime, in the army, the Church, and in national and local government. But there could be no “forgetting” for the 59 men who signed the death warrant of Charles I.

In the early 1660s, some had died like Cromwell himself; others were hunted down and executed in the most horrific way. Harris’s novel is based on two colonels in the New Model Army, Edward Whalley and William Goffe (Whalley is Goffe’s father-in-law), who escape to what they think will be the Puritan sanctuary of America, only to find that they are too dangerous to know even for the self-identified godly of New England. Anyone who would like an excellent historical account of their troubles should read Matthew Jenkinson’s Charles I’s Killers in America (2019).

Harris has done his homework, but it is a novel, and he invents for dramatic purposes a driven regicide hunter, Richard Nayler, who stops at nothing to bring the regicides to justice. In his obsession, Nayler utterly abandons his moral compass, and his cruel manipulation of Goffe’s wife, Frances, is chilling. He blames the colonels for the death of his wife and child after his arrest at an illegal Prayer Book communion service on Christmas Day in the 1650s — a double violation in the Cromwellian regime.

I wasn’t entirely convinced, early on in the novel, that Nayler, a staunch Royalist, needed this extra dose of motivation to justify his obsession. The novel’s powerful and moving ending, however, gives it dramatic coherence.


Canon Judith Maltby is Chaplain, Fellow, and Dean of Welfare at Corpus Christi College, and Reader in Church History in the University of Oxford.

 

Act of Oblivion
Robert Harris
Hutchinson Heinemann £22
(978-1-5291-5175-6)
Church Times Bookshop £19.80
 

Read an interview with Robert Harris here

Browse Church and Charity jobs on the Church Times jobsite

Church Times Bookshop

Save money on books reviewed or featured in the Church Times. To get your reader discount:

> Click on the “Church Times Bookshop” link at the end of the review.

> Call 0845 017 6965 (Mon-Fri, 9.30am-5pm).

The reader discount is valid for two months after the review publication date. E&OE

Forthcoming Events

Inspiration: The Influences That Have Shaped My Life

September - November 2024

St Martin in the Fields Autumn Lecture Series 2024

tickets available

 

Can a ‘Good Death‘ be Assisted?

28 November 2024

A webinar in collaboration with Modern Church

tickets available

 

Through Darkness To Light: Advent Journeys

30 November 2024

tickets available

 

Festival of Faith and Literature

28 February - 2 March 2025

tickets available

 

Visit our Events page for upcoming and past events 

The Church Times Archive

Read reports from issues stretching back to 1863, search for your parish or see if any of the clergy you know get a mention.

FREE for Church Times subscribers.

Explore the archive

Welcome to the Church Times

 

To explore the Church Times website fully, please sign in or subscribe.

Non-subscribers can read four articles for free each month. (You will need to register.)