This article is taken from the October 2022 issue of The Critic. To get the full magazine why not subscribe? Right now we’re offering five issues for just £10.

In act of oblivion, Robert Harris brings his unrivalled ability to create vivid historical characters within tightly-honed plots to the turbulent Civil Wars and Restoration of mid-17th century Britain and America. It is 1660 and Charles II has been restored to the throne after eleven years of republican rule. Eager to draw a line under the recent bloody past, the king’s new Act of Indemnity and Oblivion promises forgiveness for all who opposed the crown, with one exception: the men responsible for executing his father Charles I in 1649. 

These men are branded traitors and assigned that most gruesome of retributive deaths; that of hanging, drawing and quartering. Even death cannot save these regicides from their punishment as the rotting corpses of Oliver Cromwell and others are disinterred and executed. Whilst the living are swiftly rounded up and dispatched, a handful remain at large.

Act of Oblivion focuses on two of these real men, Colonel Edmund Whalley and his son-in-law Colonel William Goffe, as they flee across the Atlantic to the vast remoteness of New England, and their maniacal pursuit by an invented government agent Richard Nayler. What follows is a Puritan Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid manhunt, pitting Whalley and Goffe’s arduous and terrifying flight against Nayler’s obsession with bringing to justice these Roundheads who, in a particular twist of fate, he has his own personal reason to hate. 

The canvas for this conflict is huge in space and time yet the tension does not sag. Each time the desperate Whalley and Goffe shut themselves in an attic, cellar or Puritan priest hole at the approach of torchlit riders, you can smell the tallow candle smoke and hear their ragged breath in the darkness. 

There is more to this book than adventure

Readers like me who have relished Harris’s page-turning reimaginings of republican Rome, the Dreyfus affair and the Second World War will enjoy this tense chase across the vivid landscapes of New England wilderness and Restoration London. But there is more to this book than adventure. Harris’s political antennae pick up the unique blend of providence and pathos in this tortured time historians call the Age of Conscience. Whalley in particular brings this anxiety to the tale as his long, lonely exile prompts him to interrogate his own part in the Civil Wars and his faith in God’s plan. 

To stave off boredom he writes memoirs of the life he once led at the heart of the New Model Army and his cousin Oliver Cromwell’s Protectorate. This device enables Harris to tell the story of these extraordinary times in reflection, and to access the complex mental world of the people caught up in them. We witness the revolutionary achievements of the Parliamentarian leaders who emerged, often from obscurity, to wage and win three successive civil wars, create and run England’s only Commonwealth and propel an increasingly global Britain into its future. 

The scenes between Whalley and Goffe are the beating heart of the book, capturing the intensity and intimacy of their odd-couple relationship; two very different men living together as their basest selves, both pining for the shared family they have left behind. But their relationship is also a distillation of the immense variety of attitudes and ambitions amongst those who fought for Parliament. 

Whalley, the middle-aged, pragmatic Cromwellian soldier, longs for the Eden that is England from which he has been expelled. Meanwhile Goffe, the younger, fanatical millenarian, sees New England as the Promised Land from which to observe the purging plague and fire consuming the old country that heralds the second coming of Christ. It was these fault-lines in the uneasy alliance that waged Parliament’s Good Old Cause which ultimately brought it down and enabled the return of the king.

Act of Oblivion is an apt choice of title

By the end of the book, after a classic Harris denouement of tense excitement, we are left with the lingering scent of sadness and frustration which characterised the later lives of many Parliamentarians living under the Restoration. The crashing self-inflicted reality that squashed those who had given so much and dreamed so big, and the unanswered questions that would haunt them for the rest of their lives: why had God asked this of them? What had it all been for? Harris cannot answer these questions, but in Whalley and Goffe’s strangely beautiful love story he lays bare the terrible price paid by so many for an unknown future. 

Act of Oblivion is an apt choice of title in more ways than one. Along with pronouncing forgiveness or punishment upon individuals, the Act also consigned the conflict and its aftermath to the dustbin of national memory where it has languished ever since. Charles II re-dated his reign eleven years to begin at the death of his father, and the Interregnum was wiped from the record. Even to speak of it was illegal. 

In his new thriller, Robert Harris wrests this fascinating period back from its unjust oblivion, showing how closely its complex landscape of constitutional crises and Puritan politics played out in new unregulated media resonates with us today.