We first met the lovable and fallible narrator Robert Merivel — physician, courtier and beloved of Charles II — in Rose Tremain’s award-winning Restoration. This follow-up starts 15 years later in 1683. Merivel is 56. Still the warm-hearted rogue, he looks back with nostalgia and forward with despair.

Having prospered in life only because “I had a talent to amuse the King of England”, Merivel is obsessed with mortality; friends are dead or failing, his trusted manservant is decaying in body and mind and the country is in a parlous state, the ageing king ruling without a parliament. Merivel's comfortable state is the result of an earlier quid pro quo: Charles would give him Bidnold Manor on condition that Merivel weds the King’s mistress to preserve her good name. Merivel breaks his word by consummating the marriage and is banished from his estate. Now, back in favour, he is living in Bidnold with his daughter Margaret. She goes to Devon, leaving him alone and low. With the King’s blessing he moves to Versailles. Unable to get an audience with King Louis, starving and homeless, he is rescued by the lovely sex-starved botanist Louise de Flamanville. When he is threatened by her husband, a homosexual Swiss guardsman, Merivel returns home with a caged bear he names Clarendon, after a former advisor to the King, to find his beloved daughter dying of typhoid. He nurses her back to health but when she is accepted at court he fears the king will ravish her. Unable to cure an old lover of cancer, only laughter and the comfort of another old mistress can cure his sadness.

Tremain gives us an exuberant picture of the age. Its rich fabrics, foppish clothes, food, amusements and love-making are laid before us as mistresses, and courtiers disport themselves in lavish scenes, whores make themselves available in carriages, the poor suffer in a pauper’s hospital and the plague is part of life. Merivel is indeed a man of his time, shaped by attitudes, morals, beliefs of the period, all conveyed through the language of Pepys, the Earl of Rochester and Pope.