From Booklist
Our familiarity with Andrew Marvell rests primarily on his poetry, but in his own time he was better known as a civil servant and a parliamentarian. Beyond the fact that he never married, details about his personal life are obscure. Blending the known facts with speculation, Peachment constructs an autobiography that takes Marvell from his childhood as the son of a vicar to an old man contemplating his end. At different stages in his career, he is a spy in the service of Oliver Cromwell, a tutor to the daughter of one of Cromwell's generals (she becomes the unattainable love of his life), and the man, he would have us believe, who engineered Cromwell's death and also started the Great Fire of 1666. Following the Restoration, Marvell, Member of Parliament, seems to be a hanger-on at the court of Charles II, more of an observer than a participant as he relates the antics of various aristocratic rakes. Peachment's writing is elegant and careful enough that the occasional anachronism ("my tongue on auto-pilot") must be deliberate. Brad Hooper
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Book Description
In his second historical novel, Peachment introduces us to Andrew Marvell, the beguiling 17th century poet and writer of "To His Coy Mistress", also a spy and politician. Marvell delightfully captured in his metaphysical poetry every aspect of love lost and gained. And yet, ironically, the man himself was a solitary figure whose reflections and tremendous insight allowed beauty to spill from an otherwise lonely existence. Peachment's Marvell allows us to witness those aspects of his life that we never would glean from history alone, as we follow him throughout his childhood, his travels in Europe, his firsthand experiences of the Cromwellian Civil War, and his endless battle between a deep-seated suspicion of women and a passionate yearning for them.
About the Author
Christopher Peachment worked as a stage manager at the Royal Court and many other theatres in England before turning to journalism. In the 1980s, he was a film editor for Time Out magazine in London, later becoming Deputy Literary Editor and Arts Editor for The (London) Times. He lives in Hoxton, London.
Green and the Gold FROM THE PUBLISHER
"Christopher Peachment introduces us to Andrew Marvell, the beguiling seventeenth-century poet and writer of "To His Coy Mistress."" "Marvell captured in his metaphysical poetry every aspect of love lost and gained. And yet, ironically, the man himself was a solitary figure whose reflections and tremendous insight allowed beauty to spill from an otherwise lonely existence." Peachment's Marvell reveals those aspects of his life that we never would glean from history alone, as we follow him throughout his childhood, his travels in Europe, his firsthand experiences of the English Civil War, and his endless battle between a deep-seated suspicion of women and a passionate yearning for them. Marvell's unlikely friendship with the Earl of Rochester, the Restoration rake and poet, turns his poetry from lyric to embittered satire, and finally confirms to him the fallen nature of man.
FROM THE CRITICS
Kirkus Reviews
A fictional re-creation of the life and exploits of English poet and adventurer Andrew Marvell. Best known to generations of American students as the author of "To His Coy Mistress," Marvell (1621-78) was too much an English gentleman to take his own verse seriously and spent most of his life preoccupied with politics. There was plenty to keep him busy in those days: The aftermath of the Protestant Reformation and the Catholic Counter-Reformation had left England bitterly divided along religious lines, with the Crown passing back and forth like a greasy football between Papists and Anglicans while the Court and the Church struggled to keep score. While a student at Cambridge (a Puritan stronghold), Marvell was recruited as a secret agent for the Roundheads-radical Calvinists who loathed the monarchy and despised the Church of England as too close to Rome. Sent abroad, ostensibly on a Grand Tour, he made contact with Protestant allies on the Continent and became adept at gathering information and breaking codes. He also started what was to be an illustrious career as a womanizer who took particular delight in seducing the wives of friend and foe alike. Back in England, he served as an agent for Oliver Cromwell, just back from subjugating the Irish and now in charge of the armies that would overthrow the Royalists in England's Civil War. Droll and ironic by nature, Marvell is too cynical to fit in comfortably with the likes of Cromwell and the archzealot John Milton (who dreams of infiltrating the Vatican with a cadre of Protestant moles), but he marches in Cromwell's funeral procession and secures Milton's release from prison after the fall of the Commonwealth. Balance, restraint, andreason were, after all, the hallmarks of the metaphysical poets. A nice diversion: second-novelist Peachment (Caravaggio, 2003) writes in a credible approximation of 17th-century prose and gives fresh insight into a fascinating character in a turbulent age.
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