Act of Oblivion: The Sunday Times Bestseller

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July 1660 Pardon and Oblivion, That the Title of this Bill be, "An Act of free and general Pardon, Indemnity, and Oblivion" Passed and was sent to the House of Lords. [15]

Every quarry needs a hunter. Harris counterbalances Whalley and Goffe with Richard Nayler, the fictional secretary to the regicide committee of the privy council, who has a powerful personal reason to want them dead. Meanwhile in London, Frances, Goffe’s devoted wife and Whalley’s daughter, provides another viewpoint. The novel’s narrative structure moves to and fro between them, ultimately leading to a brisk if slightly implausible conclusion.

Cannon, John (21 May 2009). Indemnity and Oblivion, Act of. ISBN 978-0-19-955037-1 . Retrieved 16 March 2022.

July 1660 Pardon and Oblivion, British History On-line House of Commons Journal Volume 8 (www.british-history.ac.uk) Like in An Officer and a Spy, Robert Harris has taken a little known historical episode and written a lengthy novel about it - and, like that other novel, Act of Oblivion is unfortunately really boring. America in the 1660s was sparsely settled. Two men on the run are housed initially by the Puritans (who sympathized with the anti-monarchists) but must flee when Nayler arrives in America to pursue them. The tale involves maritime travel from London to Massachusetts to the rugged terrain of the Connecticut wilderness.The stuff about the new settlements in America was the most interesting part for me, although Harris dragged it out for far too long. He assumes people will know the basic history of Cromwell and the Restoration, and puts no political element into the plot. I felt that more concentration on the Restoration and less on these two runaways would have given scope for more interest. There’s only so much you can say about two men hiding in a barn, or a cellar, or an attic, or even the wilderness. To return to the early modern context, recall two mages who famously renounced their grimoires in diametrically opposed ways. At the end of Marlowe’s Dr. Faustus, Faustus promises to “burn [his] books” 59 Open this footnote Close this footnote 59 Christopher Marlowe, Doctor Faustus (B-Text), act 5, sc. 3, ll. 184-85 (David Scott Kastan ed., W.W. Norton & Co. 2005) (1616) (“Ugly hell, gape not! Come not, Lucifer!; / I’ll burn my books!”). … Open this footnote Close in lieu of being carried off to hell. At the end of Shakespeare’s Tempest, Prospero promises to “drown [his] book.” 60 Open this footnote Close this footnote 60 William Shakespeare, The Tempest, act V, sc. 1, ll. 54-57 (Virginia Mason Vaughan & Alden T. Vaughan eds., Arden Shakespeare 1999) (“I’ll break my staff, / Bury it certain fathoms in the earth, / And deeper than did ever plummet sound / I’ll drown my book.”). … Open this footnote Close These two images—the burning book and the drowning book—conjure different models of censorship. The burning book can be seen as the direct interdiction—the destruction of the speech itself. The drowning book is a figure for the indirect quelling of speech—not by denying the speech existence but drowning it out with other speech. 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. An Irish act by the same name "An Act of Free and General Pardon, Indemnity, and Oblivion [for Ireland]" was sent to the Duke of Ormonde on 16 August 1664 by Sir Paul Davys, the Irish Secretary of State. [23] In popular culture [ edit ] August 1660 Lords reminded of Bills, British History On-line House of Commons Journal Volume 8 (www.british-history.ac.uk)