Restoration, Introduction in EDP SUNDAY, 11th February, 2006

EDP Book Club

Restoration, Introduction in EDP SUNDAY, 11th February, 2006

Jeff Taylor 05/03/2006, 10:12 PM

This month’s EDP Book Club Choice is Restoration by Rose Tremain.a book which is set partly in Norfolk by an author who lives partly in Norfolk. So in terms of the ‘raison d’etre’ of the Book Club Restoration wins on both counts.

Rose Tremain was born in 1943 in London, was educated at the Sorbonne and is a graduate of the University of East Anglia where between 1988 and 1995 she taught creative writing and where, in 2000, she was awarded an honorary LittD. With her partner the biographer Richard Holmes she divides her time between homes in Norwich and London. Over the last ten thirty years Rose Tremain’s publications have included nine novels, collections of short stories and various radio and television plays. She has won many awards for her writing with, her best-selling novel Restoration, gaining the most. On its publication in 1989 it won the Angel Literary Award, The Sunday Express Book of the Year and was short listed for the Booker Prize for Fiction. It was later made into a film featuring Hugh Grant and Meg Ryan.

In a review in the Guardian in 2003 (see books.guardian.co.uk) Susanna Rustin wrote that ‘in her early fiction ‘Tremain approached her subjects from unexpected angles, concentrating her attention on unglamorous outsiders…but in 1989, with Restoration came a decisive break. Tremain remembers that it was taking her longer to get started on a new novel than previously.’ Rustin quotes Tremain saying ‘I think something happened then and I think it has to do with scope – with not wanting to be narrowly domestic.’

Restoration is set in 17^th-century England during the ‘restoration’ period of Charles II. The main character is Robert Merivel who as a hard-drinking sexually voracious medical student gains the patronage of the king by curing his favourite dog. He then marries the King’s mistress but is forbidden to touch her. Merivel’s own ‘restoration’ happens in the second half of the book which leads him to a Quaker asylum in the Fens and back to Plague and Fire in London.