Act of Oblivion: The Sunday Times Bestseller

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Act of Oblivion: The Sunday Times Bestseller

Act of Oblivion: The Sunday Times Bestseller

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£4.995 FREE Shipping

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In parallel strands, we follow Whalley and Goffe as they criss-cross New England, trying desperately to remain hidden, and their dedicated pursuer Richard Naylor. I was reminded of the TV series and film The Fugitive. Naylor is a scary and unremitting antagonist. Prepared to go to any lengths and yet always believable. And as with all good antagonists, we can see exactly why he is so driven in his turn. He took a while to reply. By the time he spoke the men had gone inside. He said quietly, 'They killed the King.'

Whalley and Goffe could also have been difficult characters to care about. They are/were committed Puritans with an extreme view of religion that would put many modern fundamentalists to shame. Indeed, one of the fascinating parallels with our century is that all three are convinced that God’s ends justify any means. Hutchinson Heinemann said it is planning “a far-reaching and ambitious marketing and publicity campaign”. Publisher Helen Conford said: “We are very proud to be publishing a new novel from Robert Harris. Precipice is the latest thrilling masterwork from a writer at the top of his game. Writing about a world on the brink, once again Robert throws light on our present time. A gripping story and a work of huge ambition, I can’t wait for everyone to read it.”

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The wounds of the brutal civil war are still visible on men’s bodies”: the execution of Charles I in Whitehall, London, 1649. Illustration: Hulton Archive/Getty Images

However, true stories rarely provide the writer with a neat structure, and here I feel the middle sags a bit. If you like history, Robert Harris is one of the best historical novelists around. Pompeii (about the eruption of Vesuvius), An Officer and A Spy (about the Dreyfus Affair), even Archangel (set in Soviet Russia) are fabulous thrillers that bring the past alive. But when it came to Marcus Tullius Cicero, the Roman statesman, Harris really went to town and wrote an entire trilogy about him: Imperium, Lustrum and Dictator. The reason Harris was able to do this with a degree of accuracy is because Cicero wrote so much—indeed we have Cicero to thank for large chunks of our knowledge of the Latin language. The trilogy is just a wonderful evocation of what it was like to be an ambitious person in the days of the late Roman republic, as it fell apart and became an empire. The year is 1660. Two men flee Britain for their lives. Edward Whalley and his son-in-law William Goffe were among those who signed Charles I’s death warrant and now Charles II wants revenge. I realise now that I was always a novelist earning a living as journalist, rather than a journalist who one day happened to write a novel. So I wouldn’t want to be a political editor again, although I’m grateful for the experience and I draw on it all the time, whether the novel is set in ancient Rome or 19th-century France. It’s particularly pressing when the story relates to events that took place around three hundred and fifty years ago, to people of whom we are unlikely to have heard.

What has changed the most – and I’m sorry if this makes me sound an old fart – is the quality of the politicians. For example, I got to know Roy Jenkins very well, and no one can tell me that Priti Patel is an adequate replacement. The bigger picture of politics is always fascinating, but the day-to-day of Westminster, especially the quality of speeches and debates, is perhaps the most dispiriting in our history. So I’m glad to be out of it. There’s a passage in Vasily Grossman’s Life and Fate in which the author imagines the parallel lives of a man and his murderer. “If one man is fated to be killed by another,” he writes, “it would be interesting to trace the gradual convergence of their paths. At the start they might be miles away from one another … and yet eventually we are bound to meet, we can’t avoid it…” This is the idea that animates Robert Harris’s latest novel, Act of Oblivion, which, although it is set in the 17th century, sends the reader on a riotously enjoyable and thoroughly modern manhunt that weaves between Restoration-era London and the wilds of pre-revolutionary New England. Harris has dealt with religion and religious conflict before. Successfully in Conclave, where the election of a new pope becomes a political nailbiter. Less so in The Second Sleep, which I felt never quite worked out how to bring its ideas together in a coherent whole.

If any of this makes the book sound heavy, this is very far from the case. At no point does Harris’s research ever get in the way of the storytelling. I’m writing a novel about the English civil war, so I’m reading Pepys’s diary and the speeches of Oliver Cromwell. Also Carlyle’s letters are there. I’m sitting here with biography. Literary biography and history are in the hall. Military history and Nazis are on the landing outside the bedroom – a rather sinister wall, it has to be said, but they paid for the house. Fiction in the drawing room and in our bedroom. There’s no point in having an awful lot of books if you can’t more or less find something when you want to read it, so they’re reasonably alphabetic in those sections. It feels churlish to say this. It’s not a big thing, but I suspect it comes from Harris’s strict adherence to the facts as we know them. He is careful not to invent anything that could not be deduced, but that leaves him with an episodic story.I would hardly be the first person to point out the dramatic parallels with our own age. Polarised religious sects. Fierce political debates spilling over into violence. A sense that anything was possible, for good or bad. It’s a tribute to Harris’s skill and research that Naylor is virtually the only invented character – he tells us this at the very start – and yet he rings as true as the others. But these are small cavils in a chase story that generally grips from start to finish. And yes, I did care. Read more The publishers have provided a list of personae and a map of New England, but I rarely needed either. I found it fascinating to join a journey through famous towns and cities as they must have been in their very early years. From a nascent Boston to the future New York and many townships in between.

Act of Oblivion is an epic journey across continents, and a chase like no other. It is the thrilling new novel by Robert Harris.As Nayler arrives in America, the pace of the novel increases, the sense of an inevitable meeting propelling the narrative forward. The chapters, paragraphs, even the sentences become shorter as the colonels seek to evade their monomaniacal pursuer. As always with Harris, there’s a delicious sense of being in the hands of a master, of watching as the pieces of the narrative puzzle fall into place. Act of Oblivion is a fine novel about a divided nation, about invisible wounds that heal slower than visible ones. Like Ishiguro’s The Buried Giant , it feels like an important book for our particular historical moment, one that shows the power of forgiveness and the intolerable burden of long-held grudges. Would you want to be a political editor now? What in the political landscape has changed most since you were? His journal allows us to see into his uncertainties and vulnerabilities, sides of his character which are crucial to ensuring that we stay engaged. That we do care is in part down to the extreme danger they face, and much due to Harris’s skill. Truth or legend?



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