Twenty-four years after the publication of Restoration, Tremain has finally given us a conclusion to the life and times of Sir Robert Merivel, physician and friend of that rogue of a monarch, Charles II of Great Britain.
The novel is a picaresque tale of Merivel's adventures as he navigates the declining years of the king's reign. The three primary characters of the novel, Merivel, his servant Will Gates and the King, are all facing the end of their lives and pondering what, if anything, they have accomplished in their time.
The riotous and ribald stew of the seventeenth century is boiling over; there is an aftertaste of futility and resignation in part two of Merivel's tale, but there are also scenes as etched in comic acid as a Hogarth engraving, and delicate vignettes of affections and loyalties honored even when they are not always reciprocated. Merivel may be foolish, impulsive and impractical but he is also a keen observer, tolerant of the follies and foibles of others, and open to new ideas and experiences.
Rosie Pierpont, the one of his many lovers to whom he always returns, gives Merivel and his Time their epitaph: "The World is as it chooses to be, and he was one who knew it well." If there is a weakness to Tremain's book, it is not in her fertile imagination, her lively writing or historical context, but in the melancholy at the heart of her tale.
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