While the language is modern, the book is given texture by the friction of scratching wigs and rough leather boots the wounds of the brutal civil war are still visible on men’s bodies and in the undercurrents of partisan feeling, which mean that, even in America, Whalley and Goffe cannot be sure of their reception. But one of the most prominent names on the decree that sealed Charles’s fate was that of Colonel Edward Whalley, a cousin and childhood friend of Cromwell who has fled to America with his son-in-law, another regicide, Colonel Will Goffe.Īct of Oblivion is a book rich in the illuminating details that bring the past to life. Many of these so-called regicides are already dead – Cromwell himself had died two years prior to the Restoration in 1660.

The 1660 Act of Oblivion of the title was the edict in the wake of the fall of the English Commonwealth that pardoned all those who took up arms against the king save those who had a direct hand in Charles I’s execution. 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. “If one man is fated to be killed by another,” he writes, “it would be interesting to trace the gradual convergence of their paths. T here’s a passage in Vasily Grossman’s Life and Fate in which the author imagines the parallel lives of a man and his murderer.

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