There’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.
