Restoring the integrity of my blog

Jennifer's pick: Rose Tremain, Restoration (Viking Press, 1990)

17 August 2009 @ The Nook (Denman Street, Vancouver, BC)

I'm beginning to have a problem with the five-star system that my book club uses. There is no nuance. I can read three books, and give them each a rating of four out of five stars, but that indicates a sameness about them that is misleading. It also makes the reviewer (my friends and I) appear passionless. Maybe it's time to scrap the system; until then you can see our critical insights and opinions reduced to a number below. (I lost the ratings - it must be a sign. I hereby retire the star rating system.)

Everyone liked Restoration. It's difficult to see how someone could not like it. Tremain's story is a sensitive rendering of the seventeenth-century world of an English courtier, but it is also surprisingly funny and touching. The speaker, our hero Robert Merivel, is absolutely lovable, even when his character sinks to the depths of depravity. He is so pathetic, but so open and child-like that you forgive him his trangressions - which include a heaping helping of the seven deadly sins, gluttony and lust in particular. (I used the film adaptation cover here, with Robert Downey Jr. in Louis XIV's wig. Excellent!) Reading about Merivel's turbulent fortunes is a pleasure. I wish I could give more specific information on my fellow members' individual perspectives, but we all seemed to be in loose agreement, and to be honest we didn't spend hours discussing it. My sister, who joined us that evening, remarked later, "I don't know if that qualifies as a 'meeting'."

I do, however, want to emphasize what a lovely example this is of an historical novel. Tremain doesn't fetishize the period details or showboat her knowledge of seventeenth-century politics. But she captures the zeitgeist, especially the significance and role of the king in courtly society. Merivel's adoration of James II might seem overblown, but a good absolutist monarch had that effect on his followers in the seventeenth century. James was not as charismatic or effective as Louis XIV, but to his courtiers he would have been the centre of the universe. Meanwhile, Merivel's life in "exile" shows just how much the rest of English society was moving onward and upward, regardless of the shenanigans of the royal court.