act of oblivion book review

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Act of Oblivion by Robert Harris review – a master writer leads us on a 17th-century manhunt

This rich and riotous novel, following the search for two of the men who signed Charles I’s death warrant, is also an important book for our own historical moment

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. “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.

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. Many of these so-called regicides are already dead – Cromwell himself had died two years prior to the Restoration in 1660. 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.

Act of Oblivion is a book rich in the illuminating details that bring the past to life. 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. One of the things that gives this book such a ring of authenticity is that Harris has constructed his novel almost entirely from factual material. The words may be imagined, but the architecture of the plot and the identities of the vast majority of its characters are drawn from Harris’s extensive research.

The only figure he has invented is the warped and vengeful manhunter, Richard Nayler, who is driven by motives both personal and political to track down Whalley and Goffe. He carries with him a handkerchief dipped in the dead king’s blood. “The martyr’s blood had dried over the years to a faded rusty colour. Perhaps one day it would disappear. But as long as it existed, Nayler had vowed to do all in his power to avenge the events of that January day.” Nayler is part detective, part monster, causing others to ask: “What makes him run so hard?” The answer is a mixture of thwarted ambition, resentment, and above all the loss of Sarah, his great love, in the wake of his imprisonment by the Roundheads. It was Whalley and Goffe who ordered his arrest, and he will stop at nothing to track them down.

Meanwhile, we follow the turbulent paths of the fugitives in the Puritan communities of New England. Both have left families behind in England and their stories too are woven into the narrative, particularly that of Frances, Goffe’s wife. The men are not young – Whalley is in his 60s, Goffe in his early 40s – and the lives of fugitives are not easy. Goffe misses his young family, a link to England that he is unable to sever, a touching element of humanity that rounds out this otherwise stern figure.

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.

As Nayler arrives in America, the pace of the novel increases, the sense of an inevitable meeting propelling the narrative forward. The chapters, paragraphs, even the sentences become shorter as the colonels seek to evade their monomaniacal pursuer. As always with Harris, there’s a delicious sense of being in the hands of a master, of watching as the pieces of the narrative puzzle fall into place. Act of Oblivion is a fine novel about a divided nation, about invisible wounds that heal slower than visible ones. Like Ishiguro’s The Buried Giant , it feels like an important book for our particular historical moment, one that shows the power of forgiveness and the intolerable burden of long-held grudges.

This article was amended on 30 August 2022. The Act of Oblivion was passed in 1660, not 1652 as an earlier version said.

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ACT OF OBLIVION

by Robert Harris ‧ RELEASE DATE: Sept. 13, 2022

Thoroughly enjoyable with some cringeworthy descriptions. Readers will not pine for days of yore.

This gripping historical thriller reimagines the manhunt of two killers of an English king.

In 1660, two fugitives arrive in New England. Years earlier, they had helped plot the trial and execution of King Charles I on charges of high treason. Oliver Cromwell had subsequently taken power as Lord Protector, but now he and most of the regicides have been tracked down and executed, and a new king is on the throne. The remaining fugitives are Col. Edward Whalley and his son-in-law Col. William Goffe, and Richard Nayler’s job is to hunt them down. Nayler, says the author, is the only important fictional character in the book, and his obsession with the hunt drives the story. This is an era when all misfortune is put down to God's will, and folks clearly believe in a vengeful creator. England suffers plague, war with the Dutch, famine, and a horrible fire in London almost contemporaneously—surely they are the four horsemen foretold in the book of Revelation. Condemned prisoners who are lucky are merely beheaded—the unlucky are subjected to deaths so ghastly that it takes 11 lines to describe. Think red-hot tongs. And if you think escaping to America is easy, remember that red worms infest the ship’s biscuits—and just try to ignore the slop and slime and stink you'll be slipping and sliding in. Nayler is relentless in tracking down the traitors to his beloved king—are they still in England? In France? In New England? He is clever in finding clues that finally point him in the right direction. Meanwhile, Whalley and Goffe are separated from their families across the ocean. Will they ever be able to see them again? Or will Nayler find both men and kill them? The deeply researched story is the author's brilliant reimagining of real historical events, with sympathetic characters and a compelling plot.

Pub Date: Sept. 13, 2022

ISBN: 978-0-06-324-800-7

Page Count: 304

Publisher: Harper/HarperCollins

Review Posted Online: Aug. 5, 2022

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2022

HISTORICAL FICTION | THRILLER | HISTORICAL THRILLER | GENERAL THRILLER & SUSPENSE | GENERAL FICTION

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PERSPECTIVES

YOU'D LOOK BETTER AS A GHOST

by Joanna Wallace ‧ RELEASE DATE: April 16, 2024

Squeamish readers will find this isn’t their cup of tea.

Dexter meets Killing Eve in Wallace’s dark comic thriller debut.

While accepting condolences following her father’s funeral, 30-something narrator Claire receives an email saying that one of her paintings is a finalist for a prize. But her joy is short-circuited the next morning when she learns in a second apologetic note that the initial email had been sent to the wrong Claire. The sender, Lucas Kane, is “terribly, terribly sorry” for his mistake. Claire, torn between her anger and suicidal thoughts, has doubts about his sincerity and stalks him to a London pub, where his fate is sealed: “I stare at Lucas Kane in real life, and within moments I know. He doesn’t look sorry.” She dispatches and buries Lucas in her back garden, but this crime does not go unnoticed. Proud of her meticulous standards as a serial killer, Claire wonders if her grief for her father is making her reckless as she seeks to identify the blackmailer among the members of her weekly bereavement support group. The female serial killer as antihero is a growing subgenre (see Oyinkan Braithwaite’s My Sister, the Serial Killer , 2018), and Wallace’s sociopathic protagonist is a mordantly amusing addition; the tool she uses to interact with ordinary people while hiding her homicidal nature is especially sardonic: “Whenever I’m unsure of how I’m expected to respond, I use a cliché. Even if I’m not sure what it means, even if I use it incorrectly, no one ever seems to mind.” The well-written storyline tackles some tough subjects—dementia, elder abuse, and parental cruelty—but the convoluted plot starts to drag at the halfway point. Given the lack of empathy in Claire’s narration, most of the characters come across as not very likable, and the reader tires of her sneering contempt.

Pub Date: April 16, 2024

ISBN: 9780143136170

Page Count: 336

Publisher: Penguin

Review Posted Online: Feb. 3, 2024

Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2024

GENERAL & DOMESTIC THRILLER | THRILLER | GENERAL THRILLER & SUSPENSE

DAUGHTER OF MINE

by Megan Miranda ‧ RELEASE DATE: April 9, 2024

Small-town claustrophobia and intimacies alike propel this twist-filled psychological thriller.

The loss of her police officer father and the discovery of an abandoned car in a local lake raise chilling questions regarding a young woman’s family history.

When Hazel Sharp returns to her hometown of Mirror Lake, North Carolina, for her father’s memorial, she and the other townspeople are confronted by a challenging double whammy: As they’re grieving the loss of beloved longtime police officer Detective Perry Holt, a disturbing sight appears in the lake, whose waterline is receding because of an ongoing drought—an old, unidentifiable car, which has likely been lurking there for years. Hazel temporarily leaves her Charlotte-based building-renovation business in the capable hands of her partners and reconnects with her brothers, Caden and Gage; her Uncle Roy; her old fling and neighbor, Nico; and her schoolfriend, Jamie, now a mother and married to Caden. Tiny, relentless suspicions rise to the metaphorical surface along with that waterlogged vehicle: There have been a slew of minor break-ins; two people go missing; and then, a second abandoned car is discovered. The novel digs deeper into Hazel’s family history—her father was a widow when he married Hazel’s mother, who later left the family, absconding with money and jewels—and Miranda, a consummate professional when it comes to exposing the small community tensions that naturally arise when people live in close proximity for generations, exposes revelation after twisty revelation: “Everything mattered disproportionately in a small town. Your success, but also your failure. Everyone knows might as well have been our town motto.”

Pub Date: April 9, 2024

ISBN: 9781668010440

Page Count: 368

Publisher: Marysue Rucci Books

SUSPENSE | THRILLER | PSYCHOLOGICAL THRILLER | GENERAL THRILLER & SUSPENSE | SUSPENSE

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StarTribune

Review: 'act of oblivion,' by robert harris.

Two of Robert Harris' finest novels turned history on its head. His stellar debut, "Fatherland," revolved around the counterfactual scenario of Hitler winning the war. His more recent offering, "The Second Sleep," was an ingenious blend of dystopian future and medieval past. But with a few notable exceptions, the British author's novels have sourced their thrills from real historical events.

Sometimes he has woven a fictional story around documented facts (the attempts to avert war in "Munich," the eruption of Vesuvius in "Pompeii"); at other times, such as his retelling of the Dreyfus Affair in "An Officer and a Spy," he has clung more closely to the truth.

Harris' latest novel — his 15th — sees him once again re-creating a true story. He describes it as "the greatest manhunt of the seventeenth century." His fugitives are Edward Whalley and his son-in-law William Goffe, wanted for the murder of King Charles I. Their pursuer, and the novel's only invented character, is Richard Nayler, private secretary to the Lord Chancellor of England and "a shadow who causes things to happen."

"Act of Oblivion" could have been a dusty, distant, long-winded yarn. Instead, Harris delivers a gripping, well-paced tale rich in color, suspense and adventure.

Nayler sets about finding the families of the men ("Love is their weak point"), then draws up a document advertising a considerable reward for the regicides' capture and dire punishment for anyone who harbors them. He then embarks on his assignment in earnest by boarding a ship and sailing from Old England to New.

Harris' narrative switches between hunter and hunted. Whalley and Goffe divide their time in hiding or on the move, and find their faith tested as they battle homesickness, harsh conditions and hostile encounters. "This is how we die," muses Whalley, "running from pillar to post, forced to put our trust in strangers, each one less known to us than the last."

Nayler endures his own ordeals and is regularly thrown off the scent by puritans who view his quarry as heroes. But he will stop at nothing to track down the condemned men, for his official mission is also a quest for personal revenge.

At various intervals, Harris flashes back to the English civil war and the last moments of a dethroned king. He serves up equally memorable depictions of plague, the Great Fire of London and a stormy voyage. But when he cuts back to the chase and charts the progress of three desperate men, he has his reader truly hooked.

Malcolm Forbes has written for the Times Literary Supplement, the Economist and the Wall Street Journal. He lives in Edinburgh, Scotland.

Act of Oblivion

By: Robert Harris.

Publisher: Harper, 480 pages, $28.99.

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BookBrowse Reviews Act of Oblivion by Robert Harris

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Act of Oblivion

by Robert Harris

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• Historical Fiction
• New England, USA
• Conn. & R.I.
• UK (Britain) & Ireland
• 17th Century or Earlier
• Mid-Life Onwards
• War Related

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In a tale set in the 17th century, one man hunts down two of the men responsible for ordering the killing of King Charles I in a quest that spans continents and decades.

Set during the English Restoration, Robert Harris's historical novel Act of Oblivion takes us on a whirlwind journey involving London and the American colonies, as well as people on both sides of the English Civil War. Harris switches the point of view on almost a chapter-by-chapter basis between the story's "protagonists" and "antagonist" — though as readers learn more about the histories these characters share, they may find it more difficult to paint things in such black-and-white terms. Act of Oblivion is a classic cat-and-mouse story, with the fictional manhunter Richard Nayler pursuing his prey, the historical figures Colonel Edward Whalley and Colonel William Goffe, for decades. Nayler works for the Privy Council of King Charles II after the monarchy has been restored to power (that's where the Restoration period gets its name). The king's father, Charles I, was executed in 1649 (see Beyond the Book ) after a bloody Civil War fought between the Royalists and the Parliamentarians. Oliver Cromwell, the leader of the Parliamentarians, became the Lord Protector of the Commonwealth and ruled for five years before his death. His son, ill-equipped to inherit his father's role, left a power vacuum that resulted in Parliament inviting Charles II back from exile to rule. This is where Act of Oblivion begins, at a key moment in the turbulent history of 17th-century England. Those who were touted as heroes during Cromwell's rule for defeating the Royalists — and signing the death warrant for King Charles I — are suddenly seen as treasonous murderers. Two of those men are Edward Whalley and William Goffe. While the majority of their compatriots have either died of natural causes or been apprehended by the Royalist government already — and then suffered a torturous public execution by drawing and quartering — Whalley and his son-in-law Goffe manage to escape to America. The rest of the novel details their decades on the run from Nayler, their dogged pursuer, whose personal history with the two colonels motivates him to follow them to the ends of the earth. Harris's choice to switch points of view between the colonels and Nayler works well for several reasons and gives the book its unique, humanizing flair. The technique allows him to make full use of both England and the American colonies as settings; between the multiple storylines, it is practically impossible for readers to get bored or guess what is coming next. During the London chapters, Harris adds another narrator — Frances Goffe, Whalley's daughter and William Goffe's wife. The author gives full access to the inner thoughts of all these characters, painting a fuller picture of the plot and people involved. This is the main advantage of Harris's approach: The story is all about the two sides of a war and the ways people on each side justify their actions. Beyond heinous acts of wartime violence, all of the male narrators also engage in torture and murder during supposed peacetime. Yet Harris depicts even scenes of violence with a poetic description that makes reading Act of Oblivion like watching a movie; everything springs from the page to the imagination. Harris's powerful writing makes it hard not to empathize with every one of the narrators. War — and its long lasting aftermath — warps people into awful versions of themselves, very often through no fault of their own. The grudges and obsessive beliefs of the characters in Act of Oblivion inform every move they make, and readers will be on the edge of their seats as they follow them from London to Massachusetts and beyond.

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The Best Fiction Books » Historical Fiction » New Historical Fiction

Act of oblivion, by robert harris.

☆ Shortlisted for the 2023 Walter Scott Prize for Historical Fiction

New historical novels by British writer Robert Harris are always worth looking out for so don’t let the blitz of marketing surrounding his latest, Act of Oblivion, put you off. It’s set at an interesting point in English history: the immediate aftermath of the Restoration of the monarchy in 1660. Through the reflections of one of the main characters, we see the events leading up to the execution of Charles I more than a decade previously, in 1649, as well as the battles of the English Civil War and Oliver Cromwell ‘s New Model Army. Puritan America is also an important part of the setting. If you’re interested in history and don’t know the details of this period, it’s an interesting book, not least because you can’t help but reflect on what it takes to tip a country into civil war.

Recommendations from our site

The multimillion copy-selling author of Fatherland and The Ghost returns with a new historical novel set in New England during the 17th century. In it, two exiled English colonels—once signatories to Charles I’s warrant of execution—have fled to the American colony following the Restoration of the monarchy at home. It’s a fictionalised account that draws from documentary materials but invents characters and imagines scenarios. The Walter Scott Prize judges praised Harris’s “sinewy prose” and his ability to “plant the reader directly into the time and place of the story.” It’s “the work of a magnificent storyteller at the height of his game.”

Best Historical Fiction of 2023: The Walter Scott Prize Shortlist

Other books by Robert Harris

Pompeii by robert harris, an officer and a spy by robert harris, imperium: a novel of ancient rome by robert harris, fatherland by robert harris, the ghost by robert harris, our most recommended books, the chosen by elizabeth lowry, the geometer lobachevsky by adrian duncan, these days by lucy caldwell, i am not your eve by devika ponnambalam, the sun walks down by fiona mcfarlane, ancestry: a novel by simon mawer.

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Act of Oblivion Review: Robert Harris at his explosive best

By Toby Young

Article Summary

The year is 1660. The Act of Oblivion has been passed. Charles II has been restored as King of England after a decade of puritan rule by Oliver Cromwell. In the midst of this political upheaval, the question of what to do with the 51 men who signed the death warrant of Charles I remains unanswered. Until the Act of Oblivion.

This is the backdrop to Robert Harris’ fifteenth novel, an explosive dive into late 17 th century England; a journey that will cross continents and challenge faiths.

The story explores two viewpoints. First, that of the fugitives Whalley and Goffe, both former officers in Cromwell’s army. The second is Richard Nayler, a member of the “regicides committee”,  the group set up to hunt down the remaining regicides under the terms of the Act of Oblivion, a real law which pardoned all republicans except for those whose signatures appeared on the death warrant of Charles I.

The character of Nayler is Robert Harris’ creation. However, Harris explains, “I suspect such a man was real; you cannot sustain a manhunt without a manhunter.” Aside from Nayler, all the other characters in the book are real. This is very much a true story, which makes what follows all the more shocking.

The novel begins in America, with the protagonists (or antagonists depending on your viewpoint) Colonel Whalley and Colonel Goffe arriving to stay with Puritan supporters. They are haggard after weeks at sea and still reeling from their loss, and the separation of their families.

The worst is yet to come.

Meanwhile, Nayler is frantically searching for their whereabouts whilst dealing with the other 49 regicides. What follows is a monumental tour-de-force; a story that you will never forget.

Nayler quickly picks up the scent and we learn he has a vested interest; his wife died as a result of rough handling by Whalley and Goffe. Nayler travels to America to find the fugitives. In the midst of this, Whalley and Goffe have settled into American life. They practice their Puritan faith among friends in ignorance of the firestorm that is to cloud the next 18 years of their lives.

Although it may seem impossible to squeeze an 18-year story which covers war, plague, and the Great Fire of London into 460 pages, Harris pulls it off so that the journey through time never feels rushed. The reader feels utterly immersed in the story and the characters grow and develop in line with the passing of time.

Interspersed into the narrative are various flashbacks to the sequence of events leading to the execution of Charles I. The first of these comes from Nayler’s recollection of the execution itself. Harris beautifully describes the scene, giving the reader everything they need to picture and experience such a monumental historical moment. There is no careless exposition here, and everything that needs to be explained is done with exceptional nuance and respect for history.

Harris’ skills become brutal upon his description of the executions of the first 13 regicides. He describes the killings in vivid detail, shocking the reader as to how such a thing could, just 400 years ago, be watched and cheered by the public. Especially poignant was his description of how “Fathers lifted their children onto their shoulders for a better view.”

At no point, however, does Harris bore with the history. Although this novel is as informative as any documentary, it is just that; a novel. The character development is second to none, as shown in the change of heart from Cromwell’s cousin, Edward Whalley.

Whalley begins as a pious and ruthless military commander. He’s a religious fanatic obsessed, as all Puritans in the novel are, with the idea of a Christian republic of England – a land where God rules supreme.

As the novel goes on, Whalley begins to write a memoir of his life before the restoration. Yet, the façade begins to crack. The mask of religious extremism slips and beneath we see a fragile man; sympathetic to the king whom he helped to kill and remorseful of the dictatorial way in which Charles I was deposed. His development is excellent and he becomes a very likeable character towards the end of the book. His son-in-law, Goffe, remains a Puritan throughout.

Harris doesn’t take sides in his narrative. He explains Puritan and royalist viewpoints accurately and leaves the reader to make their minds up. On the one hand, we have a dysfunctional and morally corrupt monarchy, trying to find its feet in England which had been deprived of a king for a decade. On the other, the radical beliefs of religious purists. You may find your sympathies lie with characters you would never normally align with.

As the hunt goes on and the fugitives continue to evade Nayler, the novel slows down into its fourth part and perhaps lacks pace. Without an active chase, the narrative lacks focus and direction, although perhaps this simply reflects the position of Whalley and Goffe; hiding basement to basement, never showing their faces and keeping to themselves. The sense of isolation is overwhelming.

Harris describes a profoundly sad situation where Whalley and Goffe are stuck 3,000 miles from home, their families none-the-wiser as to their state. Regardless of your opinion of their religious belief, you cannot help but feel their situation is dire.

The years between 1666-1672 are explained in letters between the continents. The plague and the fire of London are explained from both perspectives; from those in London (Nayler and Goffe’s wife, Francis) and in America. Harris explains the impact the hunt has had on the innocents; on the families of the regicides, condemned to live a life of misery for the crimes of their husbands and fathers.

The novel comes to a head when Nayler finally picks up the scent again, 18 years after the hunt began. The ending is both beautiful and shocking.

If you have the chance to read this masterpiece, then count yourself lucky; it isn’t often that a novel of this calibre is produced. Other than a slowing down of the narrative towards the end, I really have very little to say against this book. Reading it was an absolute joy.

Put simply, the Act of Oblivion is as close to perfect as you can get.

Interested? Well, we’ve got more books similar to the Act of Oblivion to keep you occupied through term time!

• The Leviathan by Rosie Andrews: reviewed here !
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Act of Oblivion: A Novel

• By Robert Harris
• Reviewed by Holly Smith
• September 1, 2022

Fugitive regicides flee capture in the colonies. Buckle up loose.

Don’t let this book’s blood-spattered cover illustration (a man atop a galloping horse) or its tagline — “They killed the King. Now they must flee across America.” — fool you. What follows in Robert Harris’ latest work of historical fiction is hardly a white-knuckle chase through the colonies. Instead, Act of Oblivion unfolds in a manner that would satisfy the 17th-century Puritans who populate the story: slowly, conservatively, and in consultation with scripture.

That’s not a bad thing, though neither is it terribly riveting. Instead, the pleasures of this intelligently crafted novel — the author’s 15th — lie in how deftly Harris conjures a long-ago period likely unfamiliar to the non-royalists among us.

It’s 1660, just over a decade since the execution of Charles I. His death brought an ending to the English Civil War, and with it, the monarchy’s reign. Now, the rebel Oliver Cromwell is dead, too, and his parliamentarian forces out of power. The crown — via the beheaded king’s son, Charles II — is newly restored, and an exhausted England is eager to move beyond the carnage of its recent past.

In the spirit of letting bygones be bygones, the Indemnity and Oblivion Act has been issued. It provides a general pardon for anyone who committed crimes during the war. There’s one notable exception, however. The regicides — the 59 men who signed Charles I’s death warrant — must die. And no quick dispatching via broadsword for them. Instead, a traitor’s end:

“The instruments of death set out at Charing Cross so that the regicides could gaze their final hour upon the Banqueting House where they put the King to death…the mounting of the ladders, their final speeches, the hangman pushing them off, the brief dangling from the rope until consciousness was lost, the cutting down, the bucket of water thrown in the face, the cutting away of clothes, the sharp knife flourished to the crowd, the severing of the cock and balls, the screams, the blood, the ecstatic groans and cheers of the mob, the slash of the blade through the stomach lining, the dragging out of the entrails with red-hot tongs and corkscrews — yard upon yard of glistening pink tubing, like strings of sausages dangling in a butcher’s shop — cut up and thrown on to the coals, the stench of the frying innards, the pulsing heart plucked out…”

Any regicides still at large have a strong incentive to remain so. But the tenacious Richard Nayler, secretary of the regicide committee of the Privy Council, has made it his quest to track them down, especially the two — Gen. Edward “Ned” Whalley and his son-in law, Col. William Goffe — who escaped to America. Part of his zeal to apprehend these particular men comes from his devotion to the monarchy; part is a personal vendetta.

But finding the pair won’t be easy. The Revolutionary War may be a century away, but the colonists are already a restive lot disinclined to do the crown’s bidding, especially when it comes to matters of faith. In fact, Protestant New England considers the execution of the Catholic-friendly Charles I justified and his killers righteous. So firm are they in their convictions, Puritans from Boston to New Haven and beyond agree to shelter Whalley and Goffe at great risk to themselves. By order of Parliament, anyone harboring the fugitives in the New World is also guilty of treason. A hefty reward is offered for their capture.

With a price on their heads, Whalley and Goffe spend the next dozen-plus years trying to stay a step ahead of Nayler by alternately sleeping rough in the wilderness and furtively moving under cover of night from bolt-hole to bolt-hole provided by pious hosts. Some places are more comfortable than others; all feel precarious and demoralizing. At the home of Reverend John Russell, they’re given the luxury of two rooms:

“[Russell] opened a door onto a narrow connecting passage between the two bedrooms. It ran behind the chimney. It exuded a smell of fresh paint and sawdust. Halfway along, he pulled up a couple of loose boards. He beckoned them to come and see. He shone a lamp over a ladder leading down into the darkness. ‘There’s a small chamber hidden behind the chimney on the ground floor. If anyone comes looking for you, you can conceal yourself there.’ “‘Most ingenious,’ said Ned. That is the hole where I shall crawl to die, he thought.”

Whereas Will (whose Christian zealotry tiptoes up to the edge of madness) never wavers in his conviction that killing the king was just and that God is on their side, Ned finds his own once-ironclad beliefs softening. He reveals some of those doubts in a private journal he ostensibly keeps for his daughter (and Will’s wife), Frances, left back in London with five children. These passages — which bring both Cromwell and Charles I to life — are among the book’s most interesting. Harris might have used them to better effect by introducing them sooner.

Not that the author doesn’t know what he’s doing. As in Pompeii , in his outstanding Cicero trilogy , and in Conclave — a novel that somehow made the selection of a new pope compelling even to this heathen — Harris is in no hurry here. He’s willing to let Act of Oblivion unspool slowly, trusting readers will stick with Whalley and Goffe through their protracted, prayerful exile in the future United States. That Nayler’s endless pursuit is far less breakneck than the opening image suggests is a reminder never to judge a book by its cover.

Holly Smith is editor-in-chief of the Independent.

Support the Independent by purchasing this title via our affliate links: Amazon.com Or through Bookshop.org

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Historical Fiction

Historical Novels With Hints of Spirituality and Magic

In three journeys to the past, characters find themselves on quests that have nothing to do with the calendar or geography.

• Share full article

By Alida Becker

It’s one of the oldest plot devices going: what Mark Twain called “lighting out for the territory.” But a character’s disappearing act can be effected in any number of original ways — and for any number of reasons. Small wonder, then, that it’s turned up in the work of three very different writers as they make their own excursions into the past.

Robert Harris is best known for 20th-century thrillers like “ Munich ” and the alternative historical novel “ Fatherland ,” set in a Europe where the Nazis have triumphed in World War II. In ACT OF OBLIVION (Harper, 480 pp., $28.99), he goes several centuries farther back, reimagining a host of real-life figures from the English Civil War and putting an invented avenger in their midst.

It’s 1660 and Charles II has been restored to his murdered father’s throne after more than a decade of parliamentary rule. Although a general amnesty has been declared, there’s one small group that won’t qualify — the 59 men who signed the former king’s death warrant. A battle-hardened court functionary named Richard Nayler is ordered to round up the remaining free regicides, an assignment he pursues with the obsessive vigor only a personal vendetta can provide. So it’s particularly galling when the two men at the top of his list succeed in escaping to the Puritan settlements of New England, whose citizens have only grudging respect for royal authority.

Harris’s fast-paced yet wonderfully detailed narrative jumps back and forth across the Atlantic — and across the many years of Nayler’s manhunt. Cleverly, the adventures and privations of Ned Whalley and his son-in-law, Will Goffe, are set in counterpoint to the trials of Will’s wife, Frances, as she hides in London with five young children, relying on the charity of her religious community as she faces plague, poverty and the great fire that will later destroy much of the city. And always there’s Nayler, who, despite many near misses and a changing political climate, stubbornly persists in his mission, certain he’ll eventually prevail. While the foreign land where he seeks his prey may be “huge and strange” and filled with hostile religious zealots, he’s convinced it’s also “pulsing with energy and greed.”

The narrator of Paddy Crewe’s MY NAME IS YIP (Overlook, 364 pp., $28) is intimately familiar with the greed and suspicion that make early 19th-century America’s Southern frontier so dangerous — especially for someone seen by his neighbors as barely human. Mute since birth, only 4 feet 8 inches tall and with “not a single hair on my person,” Yip Tolroy leads a lonely existence at his mother’s backwoods general store. But when a retired doctor teaches him to read and write, the teenager feels like less of an outcast. Unfortunately, he’ll soon learn what it feels like to be a fugitive.

In his own appealingly eccentric vernacular (“we was Boys at play in a Deadly Game”), Yip tells how the discovery of gold and the commission of a crime get him and his new friend, Dud Carter, into a “spot of bother” that requires a rapid exit from town and a desperate gallop toward the Great Smoky Mountains. What they find there won’t make Yip’s life any easier. In fact, it may make his old status as a pariah seem enviable. “Answers have not ever come easy to me,” he confesses. “By all accounts they is like teeth — you can try to pull them clean out but even then they will likely Splinter & Crack & there will be nothing but a palmful of dust at the end of it.”

Yasodhara, the woman at the center of Shyam Selvadurai’s MANSIONS OF THE MOON (Knopf Canada, 403 pp., $36.95), has no easy answer to the question that has troubled her for the past 10 years: Why her beloved husband abruptly abandoned her and their infant son. She knows him as Siddhartha Gotama; history knows him as the Buddha. And at the novel’s outset, after many years of believing him dead, she is about to encounter him again — not as the prince she grew up with but as the leader of a wandering religious sect, as the Awakened One.

Selvadurai’s novel considers Siddhartha’s quest from the perspective of the wife he left behind. Rooted in an intricate depiction of the court life and customs of ancient India, it moves between Yasodhara’s dramatic reunion with Siddhartha and an account of the life they shared before a crisis of faith led to his disappearance. Cousins who marry when each is only 16, they must maneuver through the tangled politics of his father’s palace and the conflicting priorities of their extended family.

When the young couple are sent to rule over a remote province near the Himalayas, they’re surprised to find a measure of contentment in this comparatively impoverished place. But while Yasodhara forms satisfying domestic bonds with the local women, Siddhartha eventually chafes under his responsibilities, fearful of becoming “stuck in the honeypot of power.” By the time he reaches his late 20s, he is determined to make a change. For Yasodhara, however, change may only come upon her husband’s return. Will she be able to accept his altered status or will she continue to deride “that smile by which he kept her and the world at a distance”?

Alida Becker is a former editor at the Book Review.

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Book review: Act of Oblivion by Robert Harris

Richard Nayler is working for the Privy Council and is charged with tracking down the fugitives. He is single-minded in his pursuit, and, for his own reasons, is especially focused on Whalley and Goffe.

Whalley was cousin and friend to the late Cromwell before joining the New Model Army, while Goffe’s allegiance to the cause arose from his religious fervour. Now, they are thrown together as they move from town to town in New England, often in hiding, at times living in the wilderness, dependent on the trust and goodwill of the communities whose religious or political beliefs make them sympathetic to their cause.

The narrative moves back and forth across the Atlantic. In London it takes in the machinations at court, the horrific executions of those of the 59 who were either captured or gave themselves up in the (misplaced) hope of leniency. We learn the backstory of the (fictional) Nayler and see the lengths he will go to to achieve his ends. We see the effects of their absconding on the family and supporters of the fugitives .

Act of Oblivion includes some fascinating detail about the Puritan communities in America, their relations with the native Americans and the Dutch settlers, and the way, despite the risks, they maintain strong communications with their fellow believers in London. Daily life in London is less vividly drawn (perhaps because Nayler has little interest outside his mission) until the later stages of the book when we see the 1665 plague and the Great Fire of London through the eyes of Goffe’s wife, Frances. We also learn a great deal about Cromwell’s military campaigns and his interactions with Charles I though the device of a fictional journal written by Whalley.

My one disappointment with Act of Oblivion is that the characters don’t feel vividly drawn. The protagonists all run true to type, there are none of the contradictions or surprises that draw a reader in. The forced intimacy of the worldly Whalley and the spiritual Goffe should have been explosive but it somehow never sparks. Nayler is given a motivation for his obsession with the fugitives but it’s a little too neat.

Apart from the insertion of Nayler, and some of the events where Harris has used invention to cover the gaps in the record, this could almost be narrative history. There is the kind of extraneous detail that historians include for completeness, but which would normally only make it into a novel if it was significant later on – such as when Whalley and Goffe’s pursuers knock on the door of a family, and the names of all five daughters are listed, although they are immediately sent from the room and never heard from again.

It’s only in the final chapters, that I felt the characters and plot came to life. Still, I did feel engaged enough to keep reading (and it is a long book) and the intriguing end rewards the effort.

I received a copy of Act of Oblivion from the publisher via Netgalley. View Act of Oblivion on Goodreads

Want to know more? I enjoyed Robert Harris on the History Extra podcast , talking about the his research for Act of Oblivion and the new facts he unearthed.

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Literary Review

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Sam Kitchener

Down on the farm, drill, baby, drill, set the controls for the heart of airdrie, no more heroes, gangster’s paradise, becoming brother suleyman, taking shape, brave new worlds, new horizons, where’s waldy, i’ll be watching you, five first novels, fresh starts, four debuts, once upon a time, opening gambits, teenage baroque, queer theorising, child’s play, paper trails, a chill wind doth blow, regicides on the run, act of oblivion, by robert harris, hutchinson heinemann 480pp £22.

W hen Charles II came to the throne in 1660, he drew a line under the previous twenty years of civil strife in England. The ‘act of oblivion’ in the title of Robert Harris’s latest novel is in its most straightforward sense the Indemnity and Oblivion Act introduced by Charles’s government. The act granted pardons – with some exceptions – to anyone who committed crimes during the Civil War, or the Interregnum that spanned the years between the execution of Charles’s father, Charles I, in 1649 and Charles’s restoration. The biggest exception related to the ‘regicides’, the group of men who, in the words of their indictment, ‘did maliciously, treasonably and feloniously’ condemn the old king to death.

Several of the regicides escaped, either to the Continent or, in the case of Oliver Cromwell’s cousin Colonel Edward Whalley and Whalley’s son-in-law Colonel William Goffe, to America. Whalley and Goffe landed in Boston before attempting to disappear into an oblivion of their own. The English government made numerous attempts to find the fugitives, but they were sheltered by sympathetic Puritan colonists.

Harris dramatises this pursuit in typically brisk and confident fashion. His ‘Ned’ Whalley is pragmatic, wry and thoughtful. Whalley is a failed businessman whose life gains purpose when his cousin invites him to take up arms against the king. Goffe is more idealistic, a young Puritan preacher with

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Act of Oblivion by Robert Harris book review

Act of Oblivion is a book I was recommended and lent by a good friend. He’s a big fan of historical fiction and rated Act of Oblivion as a book that I definitely needed to pick up and read. It focuses on a story that I don’t think a lot of people know about but one which is actually really interesting! The problem when you write historical fiction based on a real story is if the story isn’t deeply fleshed out in real life then you’ve really got to fill out the book with other details. Does Robert Harris do this enough here?

Please note that this article contains affiliate links. This means that if you purchase any products via any of the affiliate links below, I may receive a small commission at no extra cost to you. These affiliate links do not affect my final opinion of the product.

Act of Oblivion by Robert Harris focuses on the tale of one of the greatest manhunts in history: the search for the two men who were involved in the killing of King Charles 1. It covers the chase across the world with Richard Naylor, secretary of the regicide committee of the Privy Council, (god knows what that is) chasing these two men in hopes to bring them to justice.

Act of Oblivion plot – 4/5

Act of Oblivion , as I said above, tells the tale of General Edward Whalley and his son-in-law Colonel William Goffe and their escape from England after their involvement of the beheading of King Charles I and their support for Oliver Cromwell. Richard Naylor is assigned the job of chasing them as far as he needs to bring them back to the King (King Charles II at this point) to face trial.

The majority of the book is Whalley and Goffe being out of reach of Naylor and so it often feels like not a lot of action is happening. I’m someone who relies on plot, action or some wonderful dialogue to keep my interest and I feel like this book just lacked that a little bit.

And this is what I meant with my comment in the opening paragraph – when you’re writing a book about an actual historical event, it’s not always the easiest to fill in the unknown details and to build a world and story around it all. Act of Oblivion suffers a lot from the ‘nothing is really happening’ problem that some historical fiction books suffer from. However, I must say the final third of the book is fantastic and almost completely redeems the book with a fantastic and page-flipping ending.

Act of Oblivion characters – 4.5/5

However, one thing I must say about Act of Oblivion is that the characters are brilliant. Nayler himself, despite being the “villain” is a brilliant character – he’s wonderfully evil, he’s manipulative and he’s willing to do whatever it takes to keep his secret quiet and to get his men. He manages all of this without ever appearing too fictional, too evil or unbelievable in any way. He’s a real testament to Harris’s clear talent for writing some brilliant characters.

This leads on to Goffe and Whalley too who are both very likeable characters. They form a bond during their journeys, meeting different people along their way, some whom they learn to trust and others whom they quickly learn care more for themselves.

I would say the characters are the strongest part of this book, holding the filler sections between the proper action up well.

Act of Oblivion overall rating – 4

Act of Oblivion is a book based on the fascinating story of how two young men were chased across America and then Europe with a bounty on their heads for the killing of King Charles I. The story suffers from some really slow moments where Harris is trying to fill in actual events but these slower moments are held up by the great characters of Whalley and Goffe and their connection. My highlights were Naylor, the villain character chasing them and his thoughts throughout and the final third of the book where the action really ramped up.

Pick up a copy of Act of Oblivion from Amazon here.

If you liked the sound of this book, here are of my other reviews you may enjoy:

• Dissolution by C.J. Sansom
• The Shadow of the Wind by Carlos Ruiz Zafon
• Revelation by C.J. Sansom

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Act of Oblivion: A Novel Hardcover – September 13, 2022

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"A galloping adventure.” —   The Wall Street Journal

From the bestselling author of Fatherland, The Ghostwriter, Munich, and Conclave comes this spellbinding historical novel that brilliantly imagines one of the greatest manhunts in history: the search for two Englishmen involved in the killing of King Charles I and the implacable foe on their trail—an epic journey into the wilds of seventeeth-century New England, and a chase like no other.

'From what is it they flee?'

He took a while to reply. By the time he spoke the men had gone inside. He said quietly, “They killed the King.”

1660 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.

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.

In London, Richard Nayler, secretary of the regicide committee of the Privy Council, is charged with bringing the traitors to justice and he will stop at nothing to find them. A substantial bounty hangs over their heads for their capture—dead or alive. . . .

Robert Harris’s first historical novel set predominantly in America, Act of Oblivion is a novel with an urgent narrative, remarkable characters, and an epic true story to tell of religion, vengeance, and power—and the costs to those who wield it. 

• Print length 480 pages
• Language English
• Publisher Harper
• Publication date September 13, 2022
• Dimensions 6 x 1.45 x 9 inches
• ISBN-10 006324800X
• ISBN-13 978-0063248007
• See all details

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" Act of Oblivion  delivers a galloping adventure, with a novel of ideas craftily packed into its saddlebags.” — The Wall Street Journal

“Harris delivers a gripping, well-paced tale rich in color, suspense and adventure.” — Minneapolis Star Tribune

“Robert Harris brings his signature storytelling power to an exciting manhunt through colonial America. Act of Oblivion pulls off historical fiction's greatest challenge, transporting readers into the heart of a formative era with momentum and suspense. A twisty labyrinth of espionage and intrigue.” — Matthew Pearl,  New York Times  bestselling author of  The Dante Club  and  The Taking of Jemima Boone

“Robert Harris is, simply put, masterful.” — Karin Slaughter,  New York Times  and international bestselling author

“Harris ( Munich ) again turns a historical event into a canny page-turner. . . . Harris humanizes the hunter and the hunted, and brings to life an obscure chapter in colonial American history. This further burnishes Harris’s reputation as a talented author of historical suspense.” — Publishers Weekly

“You could read this as a pure thriller, and it is one of Harris’s most compellingly placed to date. You could read it as a piece of intelligent historical immersion. I think it is more; I think it is his best since  Fatherland. ” — Sunday Times

" Act of Oblivion  is a belter of a thriller. It will be compulsive reading for those who loved An Officer and a Spy , Harris’s book about the Dreyfus affair. Like that novel, the research is immaculate. A chewy, morally murky slice of history is made into a thriller that twists and surprises. The characters are strong and we care about their predicament. The story stretches over continents and years, but the suspense feels as taut as if the three main characters were locked in a room with a gun." — The Times UK

“Gripping . . . Thoroughly enjoyable. . . . [This] deeply researched story is the author's brilliant reimagining of real historical events, with sympathetic characters and a compelling plot.” — Kirkus Reviews , Starred Review

“It will come as no surprise to readers familiar with Harris’ work that this is a splendidly written historical novel. Harris really is a joy to read. . . . Another top-flight effort from a master storyteller.” — Booklist

“Harris demonstrates his talent for bringing history to life with a taut new tale of faith and vengeance. . . . The raw emotions of the characters and the issues that drive human dissent make this a worthwhile read.” — Library Journal

“Fast-paced . . . . Wonderfully detailed . . . . Clever.” — New York Times Book Review

“A tale that grips from start to finish. It’s a remarkable achievement.” — Metro

"A gripping revenger's tale. . . . This is by far Harris’s best book since An Officer and a Spy , which dealt with another great national division: the Dreyfus case. He has produced a ripping page-turner that breathes all the complexities and moral nuances of the Civil War period." — Financial Times

"It is easy to forget that Act of Oblivion is a fictional work based on actual events, which is a testament to Robert Harris’ writing. The book provides not only significant amounts of European history, but also thrilling suspense over Nayler’s pursuit of his final two targets . . . . Learning European history was never this much fun in school!" — Bookreporter

"Veteran actor Tim McInnerny delivers a masterly narration of Harris’s novel. He truly inhabits the characters, his voice and manner finely tuned to the personality and convictions of each: Goffe, a fanatical, millenarian Puritan; Whalley, more practical and ultimately disillusioned; Nayler, smoothly menacing, but prey to depression . . . this production is perfect." — Washington Post

"[Robert Harris is] writing fiction, but he treats the few available facts and the more plausible theories with respect, and skillfully extrapolates from them. . . . Harris underpins [ Act of Oblivion ] with substantial research and writes in unobtrusively effective prose. . . . This is Harris at his best, which is very good indeed." — The Guardian

"If you like your page-turning popular fiction at the more intelligent end of the spectrum, you could not do better than this." — The Telegraph

"Three cheers for Robert Harris, an author who can always be relied upon to serve up novels that perfectly balance intellectual heft with pulse-raising entertainment." — The Daily Mail

"A riotously enjoyable and thoroughly modern manhunt. . . .  Act of Oblivion  is a book rich in the illuminating details that bring the past to life. . . . There’s a delicious sense of being in the hands of a master, of watching as the pieces of the narrative puzzle fall into place.  Act of Oblivion  is a fine novel." — The Observer

 " Act Of Oblivion  . . . marries painstaking research with vivid historical recreation and leaps of imagination." — Daily Express

"Robert Harris’ novels are known as page turners, and  Act of Oblivion  takes this signature feature to the next kinetic level. . . . Aside from the fast-paced prose, a feature of Harris’ novels is thorough historical research.  Act of Oblivion  is no exception. . . . There are many electrifying scenes in this fast and furious historical thriller that keeps the reader in suspense until the last page." — Sydney Morning Herald

“Harris’s new chase thriller is a tour de force.” — i

“I admire Robert [Harris] boundlessly for his originality as well as superb narrative skill.” — Max Hastings, author of  Inferno

“Robert Harris never fails to dazzle me . . . . his research is superb, his characters intrinsically interesting and his writing crisp and elegant. . . . Describing this book as a chase is to do it an injustice. It has elements of social history as well as being a truly moving family tale. . . . You can read Harris as a mystery author or a fine historian with equal pleasure or you can just read him for the sheer joy of it, as I do. This will definitely be one of my best books of the year." — The Globe and Mail

“Harris, deft as ever, weaves a hefty amount of historical fact into the narrative—politics, religion, colonial life, family ties—as well as themes of forgiveness and reconciliation.” — New Statesman

“ Act of Oblivion  is more than just a page-turner. . . . Harris’s denouement goes for theatrical effect and down-to-the-wire suspense.” — London Review of Books

“Harris skilfully weaves pieces of his characters’ pasts giving the story depth and credibility. His research is comprehensive. . . .  Act of Oblivion  is a clever novel, building slowly and showing more than the hunt for two fugitives.” — Sunday Times  (South Africa)

“Robert Harris is the master of the high-quality historical thriller. History is not simply a backdrop in his novels, but an interlocutor with our own age. . . . Harris displays an impressive grasp of the historical context without taxing his readers by showing his ‘workings.’” — Church Times

“There is satisfaction in the well-made novel, and Robert Harris’s  Act of Oblivion . . . [is one of the] best-made and therefore most enjoyable new novels I read this year.” — The Scotsman

"A lightning-quick thriller, the tension cranked right up throughout, and Harris' 17th century New England is so real you can almost smell it." — Tim Weaver, author of Blackbird

"The master of the intelligent thriller." — Daily Telegraph

"Harris is a master of historical fiction, a compelling author who brings to life the recent and ancient past." — Times Literary Supplement

"A tale that grips from start to finish. It's a remarkable achievement." — Metro

"Master storyteller Robert Harris has forged history anew, melding fact and fiction." — RTÉ

"Harris spins an exciting tale which I hope will leave you hungry for more." — Inside History Magazine

"Lucid and full of suspense." — Spectator

"In his new thriller, Robert Harris wrests [a] fascinating period back from its unjust oblivion, showing how closely its complex landscape of constitutional crises and Puritan politics played out in new unregulated media resonates with us today." — The Critic?

"A drama so involving and nerve-wracking, you can barely turn the pages fast enough. Historic!"  — Saga Magazine

"What Harris does here is nothing short of masterful." — Irish Times

"Pacy and tense, and the pungently evoked past offers up some shrewd present-day parallels." — Mail on Sunday

About the Author

Robert Harris is the author of Act of Oblivion, Pompeii, Enigma, and Fatherland . He has been a television correspondent with the BBC and a newspaper columnist for London’s Sunday Times and Daily Telegraph. His novels have sold more than ten million copies and been translated into thirty languages. He lives in Berkshire, England, with his wife and four children. 

Product details

• Publisher ‏ : ‎ Harper (September 13, 2022)
• Language ‏ : ‎ English
• Hardcover ‏ : ‎ 480 pages
• ISBN-10 ‏ : ‎ 006324800X
• ISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 978-0063248007
• Item Weight ‏ : ‎ 1.4 pounds
• Dimensions ‏ : ‎ 6 x 1.45 x 9 inches
• #979 in Historical Thrillers (Books)
• #1,406 in Political Thrillers (Books)
• #7,745 in Suspense Thrillers

About the author

Robert harris.

Robert Harris is the author of Pompeii, Enigma, and Fatherland. He has been a television correspondent with the BBC and a newspaper columnist for the London Sunday Times and The Daily Telegraph. His novels have sold more than ten million copies and been translated into thirty languages. He lives in Berkshire, England, with his wife and four children.

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May 9, 2024

Current Issue

Clamoring for Life

May 9, 2024 issue

Rachel Levit Ruiz: Cara Azul, 2022

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Until August

Many years later, as I faced the deadline for writing this review, I was to remember that distant afternoon when Gabriel García Márquez showed me the Spanish manuscript of Chronicle of a Death Foretold and then gently refused to let me read the novel until its forthcoming publication.

We were spending a week together in August 1981 at the Mexican resort of Cocoyoc, along with eight other jurors awarding a literary prize for the best book on militarism in Latin America, 1 and Gabo (as everyone called him) was bubbling with enthusiasm at having completed what he considered his masterpiece. “I can’t let you even have a peek,” he said to me with a smile both impish and contrite, “because I’d get into trouble with the two women who rule my life: Mercedes and Carmen.” He was referring, respectively, to his wife and his agent, whose authority over him was well known. “I was brought up,” he added, “in a household full of strong, decisive, intelligent women and learned early on to respect them more than anything in this world or the next one.”

I was not surprised, as he had frequently expressed similar sentiments. What seems noteworthy today, as one reads his posthumous novel Until August , is that despite his reiterated reverence for the female sex, he never—until now, that is—published a long work of fiction in which a woman was the uncontested protagonist.

Exceptional, fully developed female characters abound in his work: the multifarious mothers and grandmothers, sisters and daughters and lovers of the Buendía family in One Hundred Years of Solitude , as well as scores of others in book after book. And yet, endowed though their mostly tragic lives may be with dignity and agency, they live in a world forged by machos, basically patriarchs, large or small, who determine priorities through their stubborn search for power or their unrelenting lust. The women are there to fix the messes these men leave behind and to service their male nostalgia and desires.

This is the world from which the protagonist of Until August , forty-six-year-old Ana Magdalena Bach, strives to escape. For the last eight years she has been visiting the tomb of her mother, Micaela, on an island off the Caribbean coast of Colombia. On each sweltering August 16, the anniversary of her death, Ana Magdalena has cleaned the grave, laid gladioli on it, told Micaela the latest news, and then returned to the husband on the mainland to whom she has been contentedly married for twenty-seven years. But on the occasion that opens the novel, she engages in a one-night stand with a stranger of consummate sexual prowess whose name she never finds out. That first isolated act of adultery takes place almost reluctantly, as if it were someone else’s erotic adventure, but subsequent trysts in the following years, always with a different man, open her to the realization of what has been missing in her middle-aged life, as she grows closer to death with each wearisome second that ticks by.

García Márquez deftly registers the fluctuations of Ana Magdalena’s joys, reservations, and disappointments on this journey of self-discovery. After that first encounter, her sense of satisfaction with what initially seemed a transitory lapse is undermined once she awakens. To her horror, the departed lover has left a twenty-dollar bill between the pages of a book she was reading (appropriately, Bram Stoker’s Dracula) . Rather than the bodice-ripping sex, it is this act of turning her into a prostitute that becomes the defining moment of her odyssey. It troubles her identity as the free woman she believes herself to be, breaks down the romantic illusion with which she embarked on this illicit rendezvous, and she spends the rest of the novel trying to efface that gesture of subjection.

Ana Magdalena returns home oddly changed, looking at her former life with “chastened eyes.” But she will need an ongoing crisis with her clueless but quite wonderful husband, and several more visits to the island and nights of both successful and frustrated love with anonymous gentlemen, to figure out where this rebellion against conventional marriage is leading her.

From the very first words that describe her aboard the ferry that takes her to the island, Ana Magdalena comes across as strikingly different from many of the other female characters that populate García Márquez’s fiction. Some of them are bursting with sensual fertility and joy, others stew in the lonely swamp of their bitterness, but almost all are defined by their lack of an education, whereas Ana Magdalena belongs to a cultured and privileged upper-middle-class elite. The second of her carnal unions occurs in a luxury Carlton hotel, one of the “towering cliffs of glass” that she witnessed going up “every year while the village grew more and more impoverished.” Besides a bar, a cabaret, and a solicitous staff, there is, notably, ice-cold air-conditioning in her suite on the eighteenth floor.

That artificial air establishes how remote her world is from those of García Márquez’s previous novels. The famous opening line of his most famous work, One Hundred Year of Solitude (“Many years later, as he faced the firing squad, Colonel Aureliano Buendía was to remember that distant afternoon when his father took him to discover ice”), implies a premodern country where ice is a marvel. It is that past full of prodigies that García Márquez riotously mined all his literary life, without ever writing a novel set in his own time. With Until August he dared to. In the late twentieth century, on a planet where flying machines perform the hourly miracle of defying gravity, there is no room for levitating priests or damsels who ascend to heaven as a sign of their purity. What besieges Ana Magdalena is the crushing reality of the mundane from which there seems to be no escape, even if, when she returns home from her first adventure, she has the momentary impression that nature itself has responded to her earth-shattering infidelity:

In a panic she asked Filomena, their lifelong housekeeper, what disaster had occurred in her absence to keep the birds from singing in their cages and why her planters of flowers from the Amazon, hanging baskets of ferns, and garlands of blue vines had disappeared from the inside courtyard.

In any of García Márquez’s previous novels, this would be the chance for a supernatural and mysterious response from the earth and the air to the alteration in someone’s existence. Here the explanation is rational and ordinary. She had given instructions for the plants to be taken to the patio to enjoy the rain: “It would take several days before Ana Magdalena became aware that the changes were not to the world but to herself.” She is the vast, enigmatic territory that she must confusedly explore if she is to emerge from her own labyrinth of solitude.

But there is still a place for magic, even in a disenchanted world. In the last chapter the words “magic” and “magician” are slipped in repeatedly, hinting that something extraordinary is about to happen. This moment of transfiguration happens in a cemetery, a location that has been central to García Márquez’s literature from the very start. His first novel, Leaf Storm (1955), is a Faulknerian retelling of Antigone . A colonel in Macondo is determined to bury the corpse of a doctor who, because he refused to treat those wounded in Colombia’s civil strife, has been left to rot in his house. Macondo begins as a paradise in One Hundred Years of Solitude , until one by one all its inhabitants are dead and the town itself becomes a vast graveyard, mirroring the “windstorm of fatality” that García Márquez experienced when he returned as a young adult to Aracataca, the town where he was born and grew up until the age of eight. 2 More and more funerals pile up in The Autumn of the Patriarch , The General in His Labyrinth , and Love in the Time of Cholera .

It is apt, then, that his posthumous novel should climax in a graveyard. When Ana Magdalena visits her mother’s tomb for the last time, it is covered with flowers, brought, the caretaker informs her, several times a year by an elderly gentleman who he presumed was a family member. It is a “blazing revelation”: her mother had a lover! That is why Micaela would travel to the island during her last years, why she insisted on being buried there. Though shaken by the news, Ana Magdalena does not feel sad “but rather encouraged by the realization that the miracle of her life was to have continued that of her dead mother.” She awaits a sign that her mother is blessing her from the grave, but none comes. That night, having rejected another possible lover, she “cried herself to sleep furious with herself for the misfortune of being a woman in a man’s world.” 3

But it is not in frustration that the book ends. The next morning Ana Magdalena decides to exhume her mother’s body. And now the sign she was awaiting does indeed arrive. She sees herself “in the open casket as if she were looking in a full-length mirror,” but she also feels seen by her mother “from death, loved and wept for.” It is a double encounter—with her future dead self and with her mother still somehow alive—that allows her to say “goodbye forever to her one-night strangers and to the hours and hours of uncertainties that remained of herself scattered around the island.” Carrying the sack of bones, Ana Magdalena returns to the mainland and her loving husband. It is not clear what she will do next, only that her midlife crisis is over, thanks to the intercession not of another man but of another woman, whose remains will now accompany her until the day she herself dies.

García Márquez once told me—at least this is how I remember the conversation 4 —about entire villages in Colombia that hauled their cemeteries with them as they migrated, trying to keep some semblance of the past alive in the midst of the multiple catastrophes that had uprooted them. Those bones were a way to provide stability in a landscape where everything had become unfamiliar. When Ana Magdalena does something similar with what is left of her mother’s corpse, she is enacting the same sort of ritual as those villagers (and other García Márquez characters 5 ), finding an anchor that reminds readers that our ancestors have much to teach us if we could only learn how to listen to them.

However, though this closing image of a woman who has lost her way and been reconciled with life through her dead mother is emotionally gratifying, the last lines of the novel feel truncated and anticlimactic. Anticipating her husband’s horror at the sack of bones she is bringing home, Ana Magdalena tells him not to be afraid, that her mother understands: “She’s the only one who could. What’s more, I think she’d already understood when she decided to be buried on that island.”

These sentences that present Micaela as a kind of oracle who has forecast her daughter’s destiny are reminiscent of many of García Márquez’s most felicitous intuitions. But compared with any of the brilliant endings for which he is known, they seem inconclusive and awkwardly phrased. In No One Writes to the Colonel (1968), for instance, the impoverished colonel, who has been waiting for decades for his veteran’s pension, informs his wife that he won’t sell the rooster that might win a cockfight forty-four days hence and help them survive. When his wife insists that the rooster might lose and asks meanwhile what they will eat, his answer is memorable:

It had taken the colonel seventy-five years—the seventy-five years of his life, minute by minute—to reach this moment. He felt pure, explicit, invincible at the moment when he replied: “Shit.” 6

Almost fifty years later, on July 5, 2004, already battling memory loss, García Márquez gave tentative approval to a definitive version of Until August . Tentative, because he added, “Grand final OK. Info about her CH 2. NB : probably Final ch / Is it the best?” My guess is that he had in mind those other sublime endings and was concerned that perhaps the last words he had ascribed to his female protagonist did not afford her the consummation she deserved.

One can theorize, of course, that this indecisive ending was what he had planned: to purposefully preclude an unforgettable sentence or a totalizing gesture as the character said farewell, thus sidestepping his often expressed aspiration that each of his works be a “total” novel. In his only novel to focus exclusively on a female figure, was he possibly grasping for the ambiguous endings of Virgina Woolf, an author he venerated? And yet there are those prescient words—“Is it the best?”—as well as several inconsistencies and redundancies in the text, all of which imply distress at publicly producing anything that did not meet his exacting standards. That lingering doubt certainly gnawed at him, because his last instructions to his sons, Rodrigo and Gonzalo, about what to do with Until August were: “This book doesn’t work. It must be destroyed.”

For many years it rested among his papers in the vaults of the University of Texas, Austin, exclusively available to visiting scholars, and was not rescued from obscurity until his heirs belatedly decided to publish it posthumously. They argued not only that they found wonders in the book but that when their father had ordered its destruction, his faculties had diminished to the point that he could not appreciate its merits.

When I heard that one surviving literary work by García Márquez was to be offered to his readers, what came almost immediately to mind was the first short story he published, when he was barely twenty, written the night after he read Kafka’s Metamorphosis . “The Third Resignation” (1947) features a character who, though dead, is able to observe what happens to his body as it decays over the course of several decades. At first he is delighted to find himself left alone with his solitude, his senses intact, but toward the end “his limbs would not respond to his call. He could not express himself and that…struck terror in him; the greatest terror of his life and of his death. That he would be buried alive.”

I like to speculate that the youthful García Márquez was visited, while writing that story back in 1947, by a premonition (he who adored forewarnings and cycles and repetitions) about what might someday happen to his own future self: he might find himself in a position akin to being buried alive, unable to express his innermost feeling.

Did his sons, then, make a mistake by going against their father’s wishes, by deciding what are to be the final words of his to see the light of day, remnants with which he was not fully satisfied? Predictably, the appearance of Until August has stirred a considerable amount of controversy, with many arguing that it is a disservice to allow such an unfinished minor work to circulate.

At the end of their preface to the novel, his sons justify this betrayal (they agree that the book is incomplete) by declaring that they have “decided to put his readers’ pleasure ahead of all other considerations. If they are delighted, it’s possible Gabo might forgive us.” I found this plea for forgiveness poignant, albeit simultaneously a way of shifting onto readers the responsibility for the book’s publication. Even in the unlikely case that every reader were delighted, the question still remains of how García Márquez (the writer and not the loving father) would have reacted to the appearance of this posthumous novel, whether—or not—it completes his trajectory as a writer.

Unique though Ana Magdalena is to the canon of García Márquez, he had often narrated the plight of female characters from their perspective, if not in novels then in a number of accomplished short stories that span his literary career. In “The Woman Who Came at Six O’Clock” (1950), a prostitute convinces the restaurant owner José to provide an alibi for a murder she may have committed. In “Tuesday Siesta” (1962), a mother brings flowers to the grave of her thieving dead son, defying a hostile and possibly murderous town. In “The Incredible and Sad Tale of Innocent Eréndira and Her Heartless Grandmother” (1972), the twelve-year-old Eréndira, inadvertently responsible for a fire that annihilates all her grandmother’s possessions, is prostituted in perpetuity by the old woman to pay for the damage. And in “Maria dos Prazeres” (1979), an aging whore preparing for death in Barcelona finds love with an adolescent boy. Although it must have been tempting, García Márquez rightly declined to extend each of these tales into a novel. Their heroines fit flawlessly in their circumscribed universe.

This was how Ana Magdalena Bach was born. She initially appeared in two short stories, one of them published in 1999 in the Colombian journal Cambio (and later in translation in The New Yorker ) and the other read that same year by the author at the Casa de América in Madrid, which would evolve into the first and third chapters of Until August . What was so fascinating about this particular woman at this particular moment in the life of the aging writer that he felt compelled to stretch these two chapters into a lengthier work? What made her a character who, like Clarissa Dalloway, “clamored for more life”? 7

García Márquez zealously projected onto his final protagonist some of his most intimate tastes. Her name comes from the second wife of his most beloved composer, whose cello sonata he once said he would take to a desert island if he had but one choice. Indeed, she is surrounded by men in her family (father, husband, son) who are dedicated to classical music, and Tchaikovsky, Debussy, Copland, and Bartók are played at some point during the novel. But like her creator, she is also entranced by songs and dances (boleros, danzones, waltzes, salsa, jazz) that provide the right atmosphere for courtship and the torrid couplings that will eventually take place. This mix of high and low culture mirrors García Márquez’s embrace of a dual heritage that allowed him to appeal to both postmodern sensibilities and a popular audience, bridging the divide that has bedeviled Latin American literature from its origins. 8

In fact, literary hints are strewn throughout the novel. The title is an homage to Light in August by William Faulkner, the author who most influenced him. Ana Magdalena, a high school teacher who is only a couple of courses away from graduating with a degree in literature, assiduously reads the writers who are García Márquez’s favorites: Camus, Hemingway, Defoe, Bradbury, Greene, Borges (and Stoker). And it is no coincidence that Micaela, the dead mother who helps her daughter read reality in a different way, was “a famous Montessori teacher,” because it was just such a teacher in a Montessori school, Rosa Elena Ferguson, who taught the young Gabito to read and instilled in him a love for poetry and the Spanish language that would be central to his vocation, and who was even, it has been said, his first love.

But although Until August is a remarkable book, it does not find its author at the peak of his abilities. It is praiseworthy but not the masterpiece it could have become if he had not been ailing and could have afforded his female alter ego the sort of treatment Anna Karenina or Madame Bovary received. And yet, maybe it did befall him after all at exactly the right time, when he had published what were thought to be his last two novels. Both of them feature young girls who cast a spell over much older men. In Of Love and Other Demons (1994), thirteen-year-old Sierva María besots the thirty-six-year-old priest Cayetano Delaura, tasked with exorcising the demons presumably inside her body. And in Memories of My Melancholy Whores (2004), it is a fourteen-year-old virgin whom the unnamed narrator decides to bed to celebrate his ninetieth birthday but ends up falling in love with—platonically, to my relief.

Such a fixation in an aging writer had significant roots in his early life, as he first met his future wife, Mercedes, when she was nine and he was fourteen and resolutely determined to marry her, a situation that was transferred to Colonel Aureliano Buendía and nine-year-old Remedios Moscote and reappears in other works. This is not the place to delve into the deeper Latin American motives, personal and social, behind such a perverse male quest for innocence and purification through the bodies of prepubescent girls, 9 but it is evident that one of Ana Magdalena’s attractions must have been how far she is from both of the juvenile female protagonists of the preceding novels. I conjecture that García Márquez was glad to be celebrating not the sort of girl he had been infatuated with sixty years earlier but the sort of mature woman with whom he had spent his adulthood and whom he so admired. He was a lifelong denouncer of patriarchy, blaming machismo and the oppression of women for the violence and misdevelopment of Latin America. 10 How liberating, then, to give that budding female character the chance to blossom fully—with all her dreams, disconcerting desires, and transgressive sexuality—in a novel where she discerns the freedom that so few of his characters attain.

It is heartening that even as his memory began to fade, García Márquez risked setting out for new horizons. I can only hope that he would not have wanted his sons to condemn Ana Magdalena Bach to the flames of oblivion no matter how imperfectly she might have been wrought. Surely he would have been dismayed at becoming, from beyond death, an accomplice to the erasure of that struggle of hers to defeat that very death. Let me say, then, to Gabo’s sons: very few old friends of your father are still alive, so I’ll take it upon myself to commend you for having betrayed his last wishes and bequeathed to readers one more memorable woman, this enchanting homage to freedom.

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See my “My Memories of Gabriel García Márquez,” The Nation , May 26, 2014.  ↩

See the hallucinatory first chapter of his autobiography, Living to Tell the Tale (Knopf, 2003), and Alma Guillermoprieto, “Ghosts of Aracataca,” The New York Review , November 2, 2023.   ↩

My translation. The translator of Until August , Anne McLean, whose renderings of Javier Cercas and Juan Gabriel Vásquez I have found unimpeachable, makes a mistake here: the Spanish desgracia means “misfortune,” not “disgrace.”   ↩

See my “The Wandering Bigamists of Language,” Other Septembers, Many Americas: Selected Provocations, 1980–2004 (Seven Stories, 2004).   ↩

For instance, the eleven-year-old orphan Rebeca, from One Hundred Years of Solitude , who arrives at the Buendía household carrying a bag of her parents’ bones and who will only manage to find peace years later when they are finally buried.  ↩

For a further interpretation of this incident, see my review, “La vorágine de los fantasmas,” Ercilla 1.617 (June 1, 1966), p. 34.  ↩

The phrase comes from Merve Emre’s insights into how Mrs. Dalloway evolved from fragments and a short story into Virginia Woolf’s masterpiece. See her The Annotated Mrs. Dalloway (Liveright, 2021).   ↩

For an elaboration of this divide see my “Someone Writes to the Future: Meditations on Hope and Violence in García Márquez,” Some Write to the Future: Essays on Contemporary Latin American Fiction (Duke University Press, 1991).  ↩

There is a judicious analysis in Gerald Martin’s indispensable biography, Gabriel García Márquez: A Life (Knopf, 2009), pp. 530–532.   ↩

Perhaps his pithiest definition of machismo was in a conversation with Plinio Apuleyo Mendoza: “Machismo in men and in women is merely the usurpation of other people’s rights.” Gabriel García Márquez: The Last Interview and Other Conversations , edited by David Streitfeld (Melville House, 2015), p. 38.  ↩

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