The Green and the Gold by Christopher Peachment

Recreating a Marvell of the imagination

The poet Andrew Marvell poses notorious difficulties for the biographer: there are dark periods where nothing is known of his life. In his lively new novel, Christopher Peachment has turned this into the springboard for some vigorous imagining, though in the end the consensus is not seriously derailed.

Peachment has fashioned an idiom for Marvell's soliloquy that mixes cod 17th-century rhythms and vocabulary with blatantly anachronistic elements. A cleverly pre-emptive anachronism early on, when Marvell mentions a "Freudian slip", mocks the pedantic reviewer who would have scouted the author for "legs it out the door" or "got on its case". A pure mid 17th-century pastiche would have been wearying. Peachment's solution works, and is not without its own flavour.

His Marvell is a solitary who always fears to show his hand. What some have seen as a too skilful ability to change masters is interpreted here as simply a reluctance to make a commitment. The author of those exquisitely graceful lyrics is here coarse, xenophobic, misogynist, manipulative and disillusioned. Towards the end, he encounters the dissolute poet-rake Rochester, whose example confirms his belief that life is empty and vain.

Brushing aside speculation about the unmarried Marvell's sexuality, Peachment presents a straightforwardly heterosexual poet whose fear and dislike of women is traceable (too neatly, one feels) to a sense of exclusion by his older sisters in childhood. One woman, however, engaged his interest: Mary Fairfax, the 12-year-old daughter of the owner of Nun Appleton House, the subject of his finest long poem.

Much ink has been spilled on the nature of Marvell's relationship with this Yorkshire Lolita. In one of Peachment's more attractively-imagined episodes, Marvell and his young charge amuse themselves quite innocently in the grounds of Nun Appleton. Only at the very end is the poet's sorrow at losing her fully admitted as the source of his despair.

Marvell's attitude to the Civil War and Cromwell is seen as merely opportunistic. He is happiest abetting the restored Charles II in his bawdy romps, of which there are many in this racy narrative. Despising Levellers, Diggers and "grey" Puritans, Marvell's pre-Restoration politics are perhaps a little un-nuanced. The boldest imaginative stroke has the poet responsible for starting the Great Fire of London, to provoke a lynch-mob reaction against Catholics. Given that Marvell was an Olympic-class bigot where Catholicism was concerned, this is just plausible.

Any imagined version of a poet's life has to account for the poetry. The one failure of imaginative tact, it seems to me, is the invented episode of Marvell being chased through Ronda in Spain by a cuckolded husband, whose pursuing heavies are the prototype of pursuing Time in his most famous phrase, "Time's winged chariot". To jolt a witty poem of rhetorical seduction into such a context seems quite untrue to its spirit and provenance. This is a pleasant romp, nevertheless, and what is the point of the historical novel if not to break dull rules that constrain the conscientious biographer?

The reviewer's biography of Andrew Marvell is published by Abacus