Act of Oblivion: The Sunday Times Bestseller

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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 The publishers have provided a list of personae and a map of New England, but I rarely needed either. I found it fascinating to join a journey through famous towns and cities as they must have been in their very early years. From a nascent Boston to the future New York and many townships in between. 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. 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.

His new novel, Act of Oblivion represents his first foray into the politics of the seventeenth century. Which might seem surprising. Harris thrives on times of ideological conflict and moral challenge, and the English Civil War provides that in spades.

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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. Harris has dealt with religion and religious conflict before. Successfully in Conclave, where the election of a new pope becomes a political nailbiter. Less so in The Second Sleep, which I felt never quite worked out how to bring its ideas together in a coherent whole. 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.” It’s disgraceful, but I did enjoy the Chips Channon diaries, the new first volume. My most pleasurable reading experiences are diaries and letters. History unfiltered, not refracted through a historian’s imagination. The Chips Channon diaries bring alive a section of society in the 20s and 30s with great vividness. 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.

The novel takes its name from the The Indemnity and Oblivion Act 1660, which honoured the regime’s promise not to inflict reprisals – except for those involved in the death of the king. He took a while to reply. By the time he spoke the men had gone inside. He said quietly, 'They killed the King.'

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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? 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.

In parallel strands, we follow Whalley and Goffe as they criss-cross New England, trying desperately to remain hidden, and their dedicated pursuer Richard Naylor. 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. 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. There’s a passage in Vasily Grossman’s Life and Fate in which the author imagines the parallel lives of a man and his murderer. “If one man is fated to be killed by another,” he writes, “it would be interesting to trace the gradual convergence of their paths. At the start they might be miles away from one another … and yet eventually we are bound to meet, we can’t avoid it…” This is the idea that animates Robert Harris’s latest novel, Act of Oblivion, which, although it is set in the 17th century, sends the reader on a riotously enjoyable and thoroughly modern manhunt that weaves between Restoration-era London and the wilds of pre-revolutionary New England.

It’s particularly pressing when the story relates to events that took place around three hundred and fifty years ago, to people of whom we are unlikely to have heard. His journal allows us to see into his uncertainties and vulnerabilities, sides of his character which are crucial to ensuring that we stay engaged. This article was amended on 30 August 2022. The Act of Oblivion was passed in 1660, not 1652 as an earlier version said.

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. However, true stories rarely provide the writer with a neat structure, and here I feel the middle sags a bit.I realise now that I was always a novelist earning a living as journalist, rather than a journalist who one day happened to write a novel. So I wouldn’t want to be a political editor again, although I’m grateful for the experience and I draw on it all the time, whether the novel is set in ancient Rome or 19th-century France. Act of Oblivion is an epic journey across continents, and a chase like no other. It is the thrilling new novel by Robert Harris.