Readers who lack an in-depth knowledge of this era will nonetheless come away with a general grasp of the warring forces, and the novel’s focus never strays for long. We closely follow the desperate efforts by Whalley and Goffe (known more commonly as Ned and Will) to evade capture, while we’re also caught up in Nayler’s obsessive, years-long quest to apprehend them.Īt the same time, Harris works hard to enlighten readers unfamiliar with religious conflicts in 17 th century America. Harris makes readers complicit in this passage of time. Years pass, people age, and some die in obscurity, rather than at the hands of the law. In Act of Oblivion, “real time” overtakes what could have been a more conventional (and time-limited) story of pursuit and capture. Somewhere in the town, a cock was crowing.”
A light appeared in an upstairs window, and instinctively, despite the night, they pulled down the brims of their hats and bent their heads. They stumbled down the rough road, past the vague shapes of the houses on either side, setting off a barking dog. The rutted mud had frozen into ridges overnight, hard as iron, that could break a man’s ankle if he wasn’t careful. “It was difficult to see much in the darkness. The prose is admirably lucid throughout, as when Whalley and Goffe embark on a pre-dawn expedition to yet another hiding place on the North American frontier: Many pages pass before Nayler, the Crown’s sworn manhunter, sails across the Atlantic to New England in search of the two colonels.īut because these characters-the fugitive officers and their relentless pursuer-are given time to grow, the relatively slow pace of the first hundred or so pages is hardly a barrier to enjoying the novel. Act of Oblivion is more like a “slow build,” taking place over a span of 14 years, across oceans and continents. Some reviewers have described this novel-the latest in a long line of historical thrillers crafted by Harris-as proceeding at “breakneck speed.” That’s misleading. But the story is about a lot more than that. That’s a bare-bones summary of Act of Oblivion, Robert Harris’s new novel. Hot on the trail of these so-called “regicides” is Richard Nayler, Clerk of the Privy Council, charged with tracking them down, but most especially the signatories, Whalley and Goffe.
Two English officers, Colonel William Goffe and his father-in-law Colonel Edward Whalley, flee England after King Charles II signs the Act of Oblivion-a call to execute 59 men who signed a death warrant for his father, King Charles I, 11 years earlier.
0 kommentar(er)
