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Rose tremain merivel5/11/2023 ![]() ![]() ![]() Robert Merivel, physician and courtier to Charles II, loved for his gift for turning sorrow into laughter, now faces the agitations and anxieties of middle age. ![]() The gaudy years of the Restoration are long gone. Merivel does seem like a man of his time, but ends up coming across quite a bit like a man of ours, too. Get ready to laugh, prepare to weepRobert Merivel is back in Rose Tremain’s magical sequel to Restoration. She gives us a wincingly real picture of a cancer being cut out of a breast and there's a rich and pungent sense of a slightly hungover Restoration England here, but it's much easier in her company to forget you're reading a historical novel than it is in, say, Hilary Mantel's, as her main concern is the eternal one of a human character wrestling with its defects. Tremain is our most subtly dazzling, multi-talented writer of historical fiction, capable of writing with great poignancy about animals (those who found the scene with the cow in her The Colour a tearjerker should prepare themselves for said bear), graphically but not gratuitously about sex in the 1600s, and further crafting, in a rare way for a female novelist, a male character who's both deeply flawed and hugely likable. He comes back not with the hoped-for patronage of Louis XIV, but with a rescued bear and a new, ill-advised romance with a married woman. Fifteen years after being restored to his house Bidnold in Norfolk, in Restoration's closing scenes, Merivel, lonely after the departure of his daughter, Margaret, for Cornwall, goes, at the suggestion of Charles, to Versailles. ![]()
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