Act of Oblivion: The Thrilling new novel from the no. 1 bestseller Robert Harris

Product Information

He’s done a marvelous job of this. Whalley, Goffe and Nayler are vividly drawn, their decisions and actions consistent with the worldviews he has created for them. The arc of the story is well designed, with the focus shifting between New England and London, where Goffe’s wife (Whalley’s daughter) is the primary focus. A fictional memoir drafted by Whalley is an excellent device for filling in details about Cromwell’s rise - and fall.

In 2006, Harris followed up on Pompeii with another Roman-era work, Imperium, the first novel in a trilogy centred on the life of the great Roman orator and lawyer Marcus Tullius Cicero. [ citation needed] The Ghost (2007) [ edit ] Harris said in a U.S. National Public Radio interview that politicians like Lang and Blair, particularly when they have been in office for a long time, become divorced from everyday reality, read little and end up with a pretty limited overall outlook. When it comes to writing their memoirs, they therefore tend to have all the more need of a ghostwriter. [ citation needed] XXIII. All acts of hostility, injuries &c. between the King and his parliament to be put in perpetual oblivion. While their struggles are very affecting, I believe it is fair to say that the novel could be cut by 100 pp. without losing any urgency. The social and political history is spot-on and the author’s material on seventeenth-century London is excellent. We receive a very nice account of the fire of London in 1666 but, curiously, relatively little on the great plague which preceded it. Since we have Defoe’s JOURNAL OF THE PLAGUE YEAR we don’t need it (as historians) but one of Defoe’s central points is the breakdown of trust which follows a plague whose etiology no one then understood (it came from fleas, feeding on rats and then jumping on humans). Since the breakdown of trust in the aftermath of the civil war and the regicide is one of the author’s key themes here, one would have expected him to have made more of the plague (and also because of the religiosity of the puritans—omnipresent here—who, e.g. depended heavily on their bibles for the understanding of all aspects of experience and here—a significant plot point—expected the second coming of Jesus in 1666 that would enable Whalley and Goffe to return to England and their families). Formerly a donor to the Labour Party, he renounced his support for the party after the appointment of Guardian journalist Seumas Milne as its communications director by leader Jeremy Corbyn. [28] He now supports the Liberal Democrats. [29] Works [ edit ] Fiction [ edit ]

Reader Reviews

The former Newsnight reporter, married to novelist Gill Hornby with whom he has four children, has enjoyed enormous success with his books, and television, film and stage adaptations of his work. What keeps him writing? July 1660 Proceedings of Regicides, British History On-line House of Commons Journal Volume 8 (www.british-history.ac.uk) In 2003 Harris turned his attention to ancient Rome with his acclaimed Pompeii. The novel is about a Roman aqueduct engineer, working near the city of Pompeii just before the eruption of Vesuvius in 79 CE. As the aqueducts begin to malfunction, he investigates and realises the volcano is shifting the ground beneath and is near eruption. Meanwhile, he falls in love with the young daughter of a powerful local businessman who was illicitly dealing with his predecessor to divert municipal water for his own uses, and will do anything to keep that deal going. [ citation needed] Imperium (2006) [ edit ] The problem is that this is the majority of the novel because there isn’t a great deal to the story itself. It takes an age for Nayler to get across the pond to the colonies and even longer for anything further to happen. And then nothing really happens after that until the cheesy Hollywood-esque ending.

But now, ten years after Charles' beheading, the royalists have returned to power. Under the provisions of the Act of Oblivion, the fifty-nine men who signed the king's death warrant and participated in his execution have been found guilty in absentia of high treason. Some of the Roundheads, including Oliver Cromwell, are already dead. Others have been captured, hung, drawn, and quartered. A few are imprisoned for life. But two have escaped to America by boat.Goodfellow, Melanie (3 December 2019). " 'Les Misérables' leads nominations in France's Lumière awards". Screen Daily . Retrieved 4 December 2019. An Officer and a Spy is the story of French officer Georges Picquart, a historical character, who is promoted in 1895 to run France's Statistical Section, its secret intelligence division. He gradually realises that Alfred Dreyfus has been unjustly imprisoned for acts of espionage committed by another man who is still free and still spying for the Germans. He risks his career and his life to expose the truth. Harris was inspired to write the novel by his friend Roman Polanski, who adapted it as a film in 2019. [ citation needed] Dictator (2015) [ edit ] England. General Edward Whalley and his son-in law Colonel William Goffe board a ship bound for the New World. They are on the run, wanted for the murder of King Charles I—a brazen execution that marked the culmination of the English Civil War, in which parliamentarians successfully battled royalists for control.