But also, as he makes a narrative of the chance events of his life, so he is impelled to do the same for other people. 'Would those ideas have been prevalent in the 17th century?' The novelist spoke about her narrator as a man rationally preoccupied with the ordering of events: as an intellectual man of his age, he finds causation through sequence. 'It sounded a little as if we were about to start some psychotherapy,' she observed. He wonders if the key to a person's madness might be in his or her personal history. He has, as one reader put it, 'a revelation', seeing that 'the ravings of the lunatics might have some meaning'. He is, after all, a physician, and schooled in the confident theories of 'natural philosophy'.

In the Fenland bedlam where Merivel takes refuge, he sees the possibility of 'curing' some of the lunatics.

One such challenge came from a member of the audience. Tremain talked of the letters she received after the book's publication informing her of possible 'errors' in her historical fabrication, and she took these as proper challenges to what she had carefully attempted. There was a shared interest among her readers in the historical texture of the novel (literally: the first question was about the novelist's use of fabrics for furnishing and flamboyant courtiers' apparel) and therefore an interest in the risk of anachronism. 'Do you mean you made it all up?'Īnd so she did: she made it all up, though after steeping herself in the journals of John Evelyn and Samuel Pepys. 'Have you got a 14-year-old son?' asked the prince. She had once discussed her 1997 novel The Way I Found Her, narrated by a 14-year-old boy, with Prince Charles. Why did she so relish inhabiting a male consciousness, asked one reader? Was it not a challenge to imagine herself into the mind and the words of a man who is so self-conscious about his masculinity? The novelist gave an unsurprising answer – that she felt no impediment about attempting this – illustrated with a surprising anecdote. When Rose Tremain came to discuss the novel at the Guardian book club, she told us that, more than two decades on from Restoration, she'd recently written a sequel, Merivel, because she was addicted not so much to the character as to the voice that she had invented for him. S ir Robert Merivel, the narrator and unheroic protagonist of Rose Tremain's novel Restoration, is a libidinous hedonist who likes to style himself a man of his age, this being the early years of the reign of Charles II.

Rose tremain merivel