ANZ LitLovers LitBlog

Shortlisted for the 2013 Walter Scott historical novel prize (which was won by Tan Twan Eng for The Garden of Evening Mists, see my review) and the (2012) Wellcome Book Prize (because its central character is a doctor competing with quacks in Restoration England) Rose Tremain’s Merival, a Man of His Time was an ideal book-at-bedtime after my somewhat sombre reading for #WITMonth.

Merival is a sequel to Restoration (1989).  I think I’ve read it, but it must have been before I started keeping a reading journal so I don’t have any record of it.  It doesn’t seem to matter: events from Book 1 are refreshed in Book 2, so it stands entirely on its own.  This is the blurb from Goodreads:

Merivel is an unforgettable hero―soulful, funny, outrageous and achingly sad. His unmistakable, self-mocking voice speaks directly to us down the centuries. From the Orange Prize–winning author Rose Tremain comes a brilliant and picaresque novel of seventeenth-century England. In the wake of the gaudy years of the Restoration, Robert Merivel, physician and courtier to Charles II, faces the agitations and anxieties of middle age. Questions crowd his mind: has he been a good father? Is he a fair master? Is he the King’s friend or the King’s slave? In search of answers, Merivel sets off for the French court of Versailles, where―inevitably―misadventures ensue.

At heart, Merivel is about a mid-life crisis, that stage of life when mortality beckons in the distance, inviting reflection on the purpose and meaning of life.  So though the novel is set convincingly in the 17th century during the period — after Britain’s civil war and experiments with republican government (1649-1660) — and when the monarchy was restored under the Stuarts (1660-1688), Merivel’s preoccupations are those of any man or woman in any age.  What has he done with the life that has been granted him?

While his interactions with King Charles have been a mixed bag, hostilities are behind him in this sequel, and the King is made welcome when he makes visits to Merival’s estate at Bidnold Manor.  But age and experience have made Merivel more aware of inequity in the way society is structured, and he is as concerned for the feelings and welfare of his manservant Will as he is for the impression that must be made.  The concern does not extend to changing the circumstances of the poor tenant farmers on his estate, but that is realistic in the context of the novel.  Economic and social reform does not belong in a novel of this era: the priority of that era was political stability and it would be ‘presentism’ to insert present-day moral sensitivities about social welfare into an historical novel.  Merivel  does what little he can from feelings of empathy, but his charity is episodic and has no long term impact.

But where this characterisation is relevant to the present day is that it replicates the carelessness with which the obscenely rich and powerful of the 21st century do nothing to change structural poverty. In my lifetime we have transitioned from the welfare state (now a pejorative term) to unbridled capitalism, and there is no political momentum towards redressing inequality.  Imagine if Zuckerberg used his billions to build schools and hospitals or if Elon Musk used his mega-millions to enable technological equality throughout the Global South? No, neither can I…

Merivel comes to realise that his greatest achievement is his daughter who is good, kind, intelligent and beautiful, so the dramatic tension rises markedly when Merivel returns in haste from his fruitless ambitions and peccadillos in France to find that neither of her quack doctors have diagnosed typhus.  Even today there is no vaccine against typhus and without treatment many people die, but at least Merivel understands the importance of isolating the patient!

Like almost everything I’ve read by Rose Tremain, (which is more than I have reviewed here on this blog) this is an entertaining novel with contrasting moments of high drama, bawdiness and great sensitivity as the self-awareness of this Everyman emerges.

Author: Rose Tremain
Title: Merivel: A Man of His Time
Publisher: Chatto & Windus, 2012
Cover design: not acknowledged
ISBN: 9780701185213, pbk., 341 pages
Source: personal library, purchased from Benn’s Books Bentleigh, $29.95