By Paul Carrier
Robert Merivel is a frivolous, lecherous medical student in Restoration England when his father’s intervention wins him a spot as a courtier to the newly restored King Charles II. Almost overnight, he becomes slavishly devoted to the king, reveling in his role as a jester of sorts in the royal entourage.
“My nature, I quickly understood, was in every particular well suited to life at Court,” Merivel tells the reader in Rose Tremain’s memoir-like novel. “My fondness for gossip and laughter, my brimming appetites, my tendency to sartorial chaos and my trick of farting at will made me one of the most popular men at Whitehall.”
But Merivel’s life takes a surprising turn when Charles orders him to marry, and grants him both a title and an estate in return. To silence his “grand amour,” Barbara Castlemaine, the king arranges a sham wedding between Merivel and another mistress, Celia Clemence.
This creates the illusion that Charles has abandoned Clemence to placate Castlemaine, when in fact the king continues seeing her surreptitiously. Merivel the cuckold has traded his honor for a life of luxury, and it takes a heavy toll. "The light has gone out of your eyes," his friend Pearce tells him later.
Obsession oozes from the pages of Restoration, as Merivel and Clemence both succumb to a fanatical preoccupation with the king, whose affection they crave with frightening single-mindedness.
When Clemence demands that the king stop seeing Castlemaine, Charles sends Clemence packing. The king later instructs Merivel to tell her he will take her back if she repents, but Merivel lies to her, to keep her by his side as long as possible. Merivel, it seems, is doing just what the king warned him against, by falling in love with his own wife.
Having angered the king by doing so, Merivel loses almost everything he owns, including the manor house in Norfolk that Charles had given to him. He is forced to reinvent himself as what he set out to be years earlier: a physician. Seeking out Pearce, who works at an asylum for the mentally ill, Merivel joins the Quaker “Keepers” who operate that facility.
Merivel seemingly transforms himself from a callow, self-absorbed knave into a skillful and compassionate doctor whose empathy leads him to devise innovative therapies. After one such session, Merivel says he “felt for the briefest moment of time that I was no longer merely myself, no longer Merivel, nor even Robert, but joined absolutely in spirit to every man and woman there, and I wanted to make a circle with my arms and take them in.”
Gone is the man who had once described himself as “erratic, immoderate, greedy, boastful and sad.” But Merivel’s metamorphosis is far from complete, and eventually he makes a mistake that has life-altering consequences for himself and for a patient at the Whittlesea Hospital. His past may be behind him, but despite his emotional growth, he remains, in some ways, the Merivel of old.
In its most obvious sense, the “restoration” of the title refers to the coronation of the exiled Charles II following the death of Oliver Cromwell. But the king is a secondary character in the novel; it is the antihero Merivel whose changing fortunes bring with them a restoration of sorts, even as they make him wiser and more reflective.
Restoration is a wondrous book. To describe it as historical fiction is simultaneously accurate and misleading, because although it is set in 17th-century England, the novel is so beautifully written and it has such a deep, meditative quality that it defies categorization as genre fiction. Merivel is complex and contradictory, a man whose many parts and evolving outlook make him a fascinating, fully rounded individual.
First published in 1989, Restoration was shortlisted for the Booker Prize that year. This year, Tremain finally released a sequel entitled Merivel: A Man of His Time, which opens in 1683, some years after the time period in which the first novel is set.
“My nature, I quickly understood, was in every particular well suited to life at Court,” Merivel tells the reader in Rose Tremain’s memoir-like novel. “My fondness for gossip and laughter, my brimming appetites, my tendency to sartorial chaos and my trick of farting at will made me one of the most popular men at Whitehall.”
But Merivel’s life takes a surprising turn when Charles orders him to marry, and grants him both a title and an estate in return. To silence his “grand amour,” Barbara Castlemaine, the king arranges a sham wedding between Merivel and another mistress, Celia Clemence.
This creates the illusion that Charles has abandoned Clemence to placate Castlemaine, when in fact the king continues seeing her surreptitiously. Merivel the cuckold has traded his honor for a life of luxury, and it takes a heavy toll. "The light has gone out of your eyes," his friend Pearce tells him later.
Obsession oozes from the pages of Restoration, as Merivel and Clemence both succumb to a fanatical preoccupation with the king, whose affection they crave with frightening single-mindedness.
When Clemence demands that the king stop seeing Castlemaine, Charles sends Clemence packing. The king later instructs Merivel to tell her he will take her back if she repents, but Merivel lies to her, to keep her by his side as long as possible. Merivel, it seems, is doing just what the king warned him against, by falling in love with his own wife.
Having angered the king by doing so, Merivel loses almost everything he owns, including the manor house in Norfolk that Charles had given to him. He is forced to reinvent himself as what he set out to be years earlier: a physician. Seeking out Pearce, who works at an asylum for the mentally ill, Merivel joins the Quaker “Keepers” who operate that facility.
Merivel seemingly transforms himself from a callow, self-absorbed knave into a skillful and compassionate doctor whose empathy leads him to devise innovative therapies. After one such session, Merivel says he “felt for the briefest moment of time that I was no longer merely myself, no longer Merivel, nor even Robert, but joined absolutely in spirit to every man and woman there, and I wanted to make a circle with my arms and take them in.”
Gone is the man who had once described himself as “erratic, immoderate, greedy, boastful and sad.” But Merivel’s metamorphosis is far from complete, and eventually he makes a mistake that has life-altering consequences for himself and for a patient at the Whittlesea Hospital. His past may be behind him, but despite his emotional growth, he remains, in some ways, the Merivel of old.
In its most obvious sense, the “restoration” of the title refers to the coronation of the exiled Charles II following the death of Oliver Cromwell. But the king is a secondary character in the novel; it is the antihero Merivel whose changing fortunes bring with them a restoration of sorts, even as they make him wiser and more reflective.
Restoration is a wondrous book. To describe it as historical fiction is simultaneously accurate and misleading, because although it is set in 17th-century England, the novel is so beautifully written and it has such a deep, meditative quality that it defies categorization as genre fiction. Merivel is complex and contradictory, a man whose many parts and evolving outlook make him a fascinating, fully rounded individual.
First published in 1989, Restoration was shortlisted for the Booker Prize that year. This year, Tremain finally released a sequel entitled Merivel: A Man of His Time, which opens in 1683, some years after the time period in which the first novel is set.
