Act of Oblivion: The Sunday Times Bestseller

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Colonel Edward Whalley and his son-in-law, Colonel William Goffe, cross the Atlantic. Having been found guilty of high treason for the murder of Charles the I, they are wanted and on the run. A reward hangs over their heads - for their capture, dead or alive. Robert Harris (no relation) has an impressive CV. His historical thrillers stretch from Imperial Rome ( Pompeii and Imperium) to 800 years in the future ( Second Sleep). This article was amended on 30 August 2022. The Act of Oblivion was passed in 1660, not 1652 as an earlier version said.

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. That we do care is in part down to the extreme danger they face, and much due to Harris’s skill. Truth or legend? One of the challenges of writing about this period is that the intricacies of religious faith and faction can seem distant and abstruse to a modern audience. Goffe is a religious man – he had wanted to become a minister before the war intervened – but Harris doesn’t allow himself to become hung up on the niceties of Christian doctrine. Rather, he makes a broader point about the position of the colonels in New England: the simplicity of their faith and anti-monarchical feeling finds a natural home among the dissenters and Puritans of the New World. The impulses that would animate the revolution a hundred years hence were all there in the English civil war. This does not, alas, mean that the men have an easy time of it in Massachusetts.Have a character whom you’re interested in, and in whom your reader is interested, and have something interesting happen to them in this world you’ve created. That’s how you start the novel. Now, the events I’m interested in are political events and the universality of political impulses, from Cicero’s Rome to 19th-century France to Russia, Germany, wherever – the same quest for power is there. Most of my characters are peripheral – a ghost writer, a secretary – they are observers of power. It’s disgraceful, but I did enjoy the Chips Channon diaries, the new first volume 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. 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. 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. Would you want to be a political editor now? What in the political landscape has changed most since you were?

Whalley was Oliver Cromwell’s cousin and close to the heart of the Commonwealth. Goffe is if anything more fanatical and Whalley’s increased doubts in the face of his son-in-law’s entrenched beliefs form one of the many fascinating subplots. But both were Colonels in the Roundhead Army and both had blood on their hands. 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 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.'

Act of Oblivion – Robert Harris

However, true stories rarely provide the writer with a neat structure, and here I feel the middle sags a bit.

A successful journalist, his best-selling debut novel, Fatherland imagined a counter-factual world where the Nazis won the Second World War. More recently, The Ghost was a thinly-veiled take-down of Tony Blair, through the eyes of a ghost-writer. Harris and Blair were friends until the Iraq War.

Retailers:

Act of Oblivion is an epic journey across continents, and a chase like no other. It is the thrilling new novel by Robert Harris. 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. His journal allows us to see into his uncertainties and vulnerabilities, sides of his character which are crucial to ensuring that we stay engaged. But these are small cavils in a chase story that generally grips from start to finish. And yes, I did care. Read more Do remember, though, that this is fiction, told from Cicero’s point of view, and (for example) Julius Caesar may not have been quite as bad as he is portrayed by Robert Harris. According to Classics teacher Olly Murphy, in his interview on the best Classics books for teenagers, Harris “does put in things which now we might say are controversial or we’re not sure about but, for the most part, his portrayal of what it would have been like for a senator going about his daily business is absolutely spot on.”