It’s not a euphoric redemption story, however, but something more difficult and uneasy: Merivel’s progress is halting, his character imperfect, his actions often despicable. ‘Yes,’ I said, ‘don’t you feel the pressure of my fingers?’Įrgo, the organ we call the human heart and which is defined, in our human consciousness, as the seat – or even deified as the throne – of all powerful emotion, from unbearable sorrow to ecstatic love, is in itself utterly without feeling.Ī selfish lout - a buffoon, even - for most of the early action of the novel, Merivel is brought low only to be restored - not to riches but to human dignity.
I was about to withdraw my hand when the stranger said: ‘Are you touching the organ, Sir?’ I opened my fingers and, with the same care I had applied, as a boy, to the stealing of eggs from birds’ nests, took hold of the heart, Still, the man showed no sign of pain. The vacuousness of a life with no aim but luxury, and with no occupation but idle amateurism, brings Merivel little substantial happiness - and no reconciliation between his literal heart and his true heart, a dichotomy literalized for us early on when, as a student, Merivel has the opportunity to hold a living heart in his hand: Merivel’s personal flourishing, fall, and reinvention represent (on Tremain’s telling) the larger struggles of an age marked by both gaudy materialism and earnest moral striving (embodied in Restoration by Merivel’s Quaker friend Pearce). Restoration‘s structuring idea is right there in its title, which is both the familiar name of the era during which the novel is set (the restoration of the Stuart monarchy under Charles II) and the encapsulated story of its protagonist, Robert Merivel. In both novels, also, those lives are not just individual characters but embody the character of their age. Like Wolf Hall, it’s a historical novel that is less about history than about character - which is not to say that these aren’t books steeped in research and full of marvelously tactile historical details, but that the detail never seems decorative (or pedantic) because it is so integral to the lives into which we enter. (Everyone should have a friend like that!) Not that Restoration is very cheerful, but a good novel is always a tonic, isn’t it? And Restoration is awfully good. I really enjoyed Rose Tremain’s Restoration, which an excellent friend promptly posted to me when I needed a bit of cheering up.
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