Act of Oblivion

I think Robert Harris rather wrote himself into a corner with this. The key narrative, and the hook the story hangs on, is the flight of two of England’s ‘regicides’: the 59 men who put their signature to the death warrant of King Charles I. 

After the republic fell and Charles II returned to England to restore the monarchy, these men were excluded from the amnesty granted for acts committed during the English Civil Wars and the Interregnum. If they hadn’t died before Charles’ return, they were either imprisoned, executed, or escaped into exile. The story follows toe (real) men who escaped to New England in 1660 and then spent the next decade in hiding, moving from one location to another.

And for its first 300 hundred pages or so, Act of Oblivion is a real page turner. You can feel the ever-present fear of being discovered; the freezing in winter, stifling in summer, cramped hideaways they were forced to scuttle into; the boredom of simply waiting. And waiting.

But rather than fictional, Robert Harris has chosen real people to write about. Which means he can’t play around with the characters to enrich the drama. He has to stick to the historical record. So after those terrific 300 pages, we grind on through the 1665 Great Plague, the 1666 Great Fire of London, an uprising against the European settlers by local tribes… (And I must admit, a description of an Atlantic crossing by ship so vivid that it that makes me glad I live after the invention of the airplane.)

There is a climax. It works. Everything is rounded off. But it really does all feel as though Robert Harris had assembled a container full of research and felt compelled – perhaps by a publisher’s deadline – to squeeze it all in. 

I like his books. But the blurb on the front cover declaiming this as ‘His best since Fatherland,’ rather comes across as a journo doing a solid than an honest evaluation. I’d pick Pompeii, V2 or An Officer and a Spy over this one any day.