Robert Harris's gripping Act of Oblivion is let down by anachronisms

When Charles II became king of England in 1660, he pardoned most of those who’d committed crimes during the civil war and Commonwealth. The Act of Indemnity and Oblivion, from which Robert Harris’s propulsive new novel takes its title, promised to wipe the slate clean and ‘bury all seeds of future discords’. But the monarch, generally tolerant, made an exception of the 59 men who, 11 years earlier, had signed his father Charles I’s death warrant.

Act of Oblivion opens on a drowsy midsummer day as two of those 59, having fled across the Atlantic, arrive in Boston. One is Oliver Cromwell’s cousin, Edward Whalley, and the other Whalley’s son-in-law, William Goffe. Both characters are based on real people (major generals, though Harris makes them colonels), and this densely populated novel, which spans two decades, abounds with familiar figures and incidents. The plague of 1665 liquefies its victims’ bodies; Samuel Pepys appears fleetingly, and the Great Fire of London rips through the city’s medieval heart. A distant observer spots a ‘fringe of brilliant orange creeping wormlike along the crowded houses lining London Bridge’.

The plague of 1665 liquifies its victims’ bodies, and the Great Fire rips through the city’s medieval heart

Richard Nayler, who’s charged with locating the regicides, is Harris’s invention – ‘one of those shadows who moves, anonymous, along the private passages and through the council chambers of every nation in every age’. He keeps a handkerchief stained with Charles I’s blood in a pouch next to his heart, and has ugly personal reasons for reviling the parliamentarian forces. Inevitably, he becomes consumed with the hunt for Whalley and Goffe.