Restoration: Rose Tremain

Merivel is awful but we like him. He's a more introspective Pepys (with the blessing of a 20th century prose style) - a clownish, childish little man, with large appetites- for clothes, food, sex (especially sex)- and a touching devotion to (a) the King who pops in and out of his life like the Deus ex Machina Merivel wills him to be and (b) the sour and pathetic Quaker John Pearce, who is his antithesis and good angel. He's the sort of person about whom we  say, "Yes, but he's harmless". In Merivel's case this isn't entirely true but we're more than happy to overlook the evil he does just so long as he goes on talking to us.  Above all, Merivel is a voice- and the invention or discovery of a voice as irresistible as this is the novelistic equivalent of Paul McCartney waking up with "Yesterday" going through his head. 

The Big Four

He's done it. There were times when it looked as if changing times and tastes- and the economy and all that- would scupper the enterprise, but here we are at last- embarking on the final season of Poirot, with everything Christie wrote about the little man safely processed into images. By this stage of the game all the good stuff has been used up and we're down to the dregs, but never mind: the feebler the source material the less anyone is going to mind if you muck it about. The Big Four is the one in which Poirot tackles the Yellow Peril and pretends to be his own twin. It's nobody's finest hour- so the omnipresent Mark Gattis and his co-writer have taken amusing elements of the original- murders by chess board, and electric fire, the clue of the joint of mutton- and inserted them into a very different story with an entirely different denouement- and the preposterous theatricality of the original is taken advantage of- bent back upon itself and tied into an elegant knot. The chief joy of this episode is the return after an absence of ten years of Japp, Hastings and Lemon.  One had hardly dared hope that those three actors would be available and willing, but- here they are...

Actually, it's not entirely true about the dregs. Suchet has been holding Curtain in reserve- for obvious reasons- and Curtain is one of the best.