So I saw movie version of this book about a zillion years ago in a tiny arthouse theater in a second tier southern city and I was unsurprisingly the only person in the audience At the time, I did not know it had been a nove, but the movie was a mess in that wonderfully awful way that terrible attempts at prestige films can be.*


For better of worse, the novel (which is reasonably straightforward and competently written) could not possibly compete with the campy highs of the film it inspired. As a novel, it moves at a bit of a plod, which is surprising given that it manages to hit upon both the plague and the fire of London. Still, it subverts the reformed rake trope (in itself a device of any good Restoration comedy) cleverly and makes for a reasonably entertaining read.




*Maybe the world didn't need to see a bewigged and beribboned Robert Downey Jr flouncing around Sam Neill's Blackadder-ish Charles II, or for that matter a Puritan David Thewlis or Meg Ryan hilariously miscast as a schizophrenic 17th Century Irish woman. But I am telling you, people, it is/was a highly entertaining piece of luxuriously corseted crap.