Review: "Merivel: A Man of His Time," Rose Tremain

By Paul Carrier 

When first we met Robert Merivel, in Rose Tremain’s novel Restoration, he was a callow and impressionable young man who was lucky - or perhaps unlucky - enough to become a courtier to England’s King Charles II, following the revival of the monarchy in 1660.

Restoration is a picaresque novel, as the would-be physician, a shallow bon vivant, gradually matures into something resembling an adult during a series of misadventures that he later dubs his “Days of Folly.” Now he has returned, older and presumably wiser, in Merivel, a poignant sequel that begins some 15 years or so after the close of the previous novel.

Restored to Bidnold, the Norfolk estate that the king took from him in Restoration, Merivel is now a middle-aged country gentleman who shares his home with his teenage daughter, Margaret, and relies on the king’s largesse to meet his financial needs.

His medical practice and comfortable life should make him complacent and self-satisfied. But Merivel, known for his wit and good humor, is filled with ennui and melancholy. His gloom worsens when he learns that his beloved Margaret is planning an extended stay with a friend’s family in Cornwall, which would leave Merivel alone at Bidnold with his aged servants.

So Merivel seeks help from King Charles, who gives him a letter of introduction to the French king, Louis XIV. Sailing to France, Merivel makes a failed bid to become a physician at Versailles, where he falls in love with Louise de Flamanville, a married Swiss botanist. After running afoul of her husband, Merivel decides to return home, but not before rescuing a captive bear that he brings with him to England.

Adversity and good fortune both follow as Merivel’s life takes myriad turns, sometimes fueled by his impulsive nature and what he describes as his “animal appetites.” Through it all, his optimism waxes and wanes. Triumphs play out against setbacks. He is alternately upbeat and depressed as he grapples with a lingering sense that he has little to show for his life.

“I arrive very frequently at the suspicion that my life is a trifling thing, ill-lived, full of Misjudgement, Indulgence and Sloth, leading me only deeper and deeper into an abyss of Confusion and Emptiness, in which I no longer recall why I am alive,” he muses early on in the novel.
 
Merivel is a delightfully complex character, perhaps even more so than he was in Restoration because age has smoothed his rough edges a bit without fully erasing his roguish sensibilities. Now in his late 50s, he still “keeps laughter alive,” as King Charles puts it, yet he remains profoundly unhappy and dissatisfied.

A surprisingly modern man, Merivel is angst-ridden, a knave and jester who loves his daughter deeply and has a thoughtful, sometimes profound, outlook on his world. In addition to questioning the meaning of his escapade-filled life, he remains devoted both to the king and to the memory of a long-dead friend who disdained the excesses and frivolity of the court. His profound affection for animals says much about his character.

As The Daily Telegraph, a British newspaper put it: “Robert Merivel is one of the great imaginative creations in English literature of the past 50 years.”

Merivel’s inner monologue, and the slightly stilted language he uses in conversation, have an appropriately antiquated sound that is never overbearing or distracting. The fact that Merivel routinely capitalizes common nouns at random adds to the novel’s period feel, as anyone who has read very old documents can appreciate.

Tremain provides enough historical context in Merivel to guide readers who are unfamiliar with Restoration, but Merivel offers a richer, more profound experience to those who have read the previous novel.

Review: "Restoration," Rose Tremain

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.