The Green and the Gold

by Christopher Peachment

Picador £15.99, pp320

Andrew Marvell is a biographer's nightmare. 'A more elusive, non-recorded character is hardly to be found,' wrote Augustine Birrell in 1905. We still don't know whether Marvell was a royalist, a parliamentarian, a double agent or a spy for the Dutch. We don't know why he switched from lyrics to satire, or when. We don't even know whether he died a bachelor. Eight months after his death, his former landlady claimed to be his widow, and, to bolster her (probably spurious) claim, rootled through his papers and published many of the poems which today guarantee his reputation.

In this fictionalised autobiography written in the poet's own voice, Christopher Peachment imagines Marvell as a charmless misogynist. He has a lot of fun filling in the gaps in the poet's biography and makes inscrutability the key to his character; his Marvell takes pleasure in withholding information.

From what he does tell us, Peachment's Marvell comes across as smug, priggish and - even after befriending the scurrilous, syphilitic Earl of Rochester - deeply prurient. Peachment parodies the way academics contrive to put their heroes at the centre of whatever the action was at their time; his Marvell is everywhere at once, plotting the poisoning of Cromwell, even venturing down to Pudding Lane to start the Great Fire of London. There he bumps into 'busy, flustered' Samuel Pepys, and asks him what he would save if the flames reached his home; he chooses 'my parmazan cheeses, and a little wine'.

Peachment relishes the gory details of seventeenth-century London: Charles I's head being sewn back on his body to guarantee his resurrection, then getting ripped back off by Cromwell, and Cromwell's own body exploding.

'There was a sound like a noisy wet fart, the lead sheet burst open and the divines were showered with putrefied meat. This did not do much for their devotions. I must say it seemed a fit end for a man who spent his whole life exploding over one damn thing or another. Still, he had the final word as usual.'

It's mischievous writing, particularly when Peachment imagines the poems' inspirations. Marvell's Coy Mistress, variously visualised by critics as a reluctant virgin or an allegorical figure, turns out to be a Spanish stunner whose husband, Don Coyote, discovers Marvell in a cupboard. The couplet 'But at my back I always hear/ Time's winged chariot hurrying near' is glossed by Peachment's Marvell as the sound of the outraged husband's flunkies chasing him. 'I originally wrote,' he says, 'while still very much dry-mouthed and heart-pounding from the experience: "And at my back I clearly hear/ 10 Spanish cut-throats hurrying near."' He goes on to reflect, oozing self-satisfaction:'No one will know who my "Coy Mistress" was. She will be like Shakespeare's "Dark Lady", the object of much future curiosity.'

Ventriloquising historical figures is fraught with pitfalls, not all of which Peachment avoids. Amid the seventeenth-century spellings are instances of twenty-first century demotic ('waste basket', 'Freudian slip', 'autopilot'). These anachronisms distract; they are part of the reason that Peachment's protagonist never really leaps from the page, unlike Rochester.

He was probably the most exciting figure in Marvell's life and is certainly the most exciting character in Peachment's novel, to the extent that the cover features his portrait rather than Marvell's. Perhaps this is due to the fact that another frustration for his biographers is that we still don't know what the poet looks like.

Even in fiction, Marvell is still elusive after all these years.