"Restoration" by Rose Tremain

The marvelous Rose Tremain renders a highly memorable protagonist—one hesitates to call him a hero—in her 1989 novel Restoration. Sir Robert Merivel, who receives his title during the narrative, is too lustful, too tipsy, and too gluttonous to be an example of virtue, particularly in Restoration England, where our story is set. Charles II takes the throne Parliament restores to its king, the country tired of, as the author says in her Afterword, “… [keeping] their thoughts obediently turned to a Protestant God who commanded civic duty, modesty, hard work and self-sacrifice.” Tremain renders Restoration London, with every trend, every thought, every fashion, and every favor emanating from the Monarch, in such delicious detail, that you will be swept up.

Under Charles, Britain rushes to embrace the new mania for personal gain and all things shallow and showy. Robert Merivel reflects this mania, and in fact, seeks to be an exemplar of his time. You could say, without fear of contradiction, that he accomplishes this. I would dare to say that his reverses do nothing to alter our opinion—he’s still an exactly typical man of court. We meet him while he’s studying anatomy at Cambridge. This discipline he falls out of in short order: his father is glove maker to the King, and he brings Robert and introduces him to His Majesty. Robert is overwhelmed in the Royal presence, physically ill and unable to stand and present himself appropriately. Thus does Charles’s presence affect him through the entire book.

By her own account, Tremain wrote Restoration during the 1980s as an indictment of Thatcher’s greedy and preening England. It feels even more timely today, a mirror to modern Western consumerism and income inequality run amok. It remains on point, it exhibits Tremain’s unflagging skill in evoking a time and place, and focuses its first-person energy on a highly entertaining, and at times even sympathetic, character.