Resolution is a 2016 historical novel by English writer A. N. Wilson. It is a fictionalised account of the life of the 18th century German naturalist, writer and revolutionary George Forster. Main aspects of Forster's life covered by the novel include his participation in the second voyage of James Cook, his marriage to Therese Heyne and his experiences in the French Revolution as a protagonist of the Republic of Mainz. The book is based on historical sources including the journals of Cook and of Forster's father Reinhold as well as Forster's works, but includes also some invented figures and deliberately deviates from some historical facts.
The book has been praised for its atmosphere, its imagination and its depictions of the Forster marriage, but also criticised for not adding much of value to the source material. The author justified turning Forster into a fictional character by stating that Forster himself had turned his life into fiction.
Background
George Forster (27 November 1754–10 January 1794) was a German naturalist, writer and revolutionary. At the age of 17, he accompanied his father Reinhold on the 1772–1775 second voyage of James Cook. George was the assistant to his father, who served as the naturalist for the voyage. After their return to England, his father was forbidden from writing an account of the journey, and George wrote A Voyage Round the World instead, which was published in 1777. Forster became a professor at Collegium Carolinum in Kassel in 1778. In 1785, he married Therese Heyne, daughter of the University of Göttingen professor Christian Gottlob Heyne and moved with her to Vilnius. They had a difficult marriage, and a few years after their move to Mainz in 1788, Therese started an affair with Ludwig Ferdinand Huber. Forster became entangled in the French Revolution and was a leading spokesperson for the Republic of Mainz. In March 1793, Forster and Adam Lux were sent as delegates to Paris, where Lux was executed in November. After seeing Therese, Huber and his children in Travers, Switzerland, for a final time in late 1793, Forster died in Paris on 10 January 1794.
A. N. Wilson (born 27 October 1950) is an English journalist, essayist and author. He has written more than twenty novels as well as several biographies. To explain why he wrote a fictionalised account of George Forster's life instead of a biography, Wilson stated in a Spectator column that Forster himself had turned his life into fiction, and "inhabit[ed] a borderline between fact and fiction."
Content
The novel interleaves the second voyage of James Cook with the rest of George Forster's life. The first scene is set in 1772 on board of on the way to Cape Town. It contains a review of George Forster's early life, accompanying his father to Russia and then to England, and the preparations for Cook's journey including the withdrawal of Joseph Banks that allowed them to participate in his stead. It also introduces the character of Nally, a sailor who is hired as servant by the Forsters and who has a crush on George. The next scene, set in 1784, shows the beginning of George's difficult marriage to Therese Heyne with flashbacks to her early life. After a description of the events of Cook's journey towards the Antarctic in 1772/73, the book goes through Forster's life from 1785 to 1788: life in Vilnius with his wife and daughter Rose, the hope to go on the Mulovsky expedition, and after its cancellation the offer to become university librarian in Mainz. The following description of Cook's journey in 1773 includes stays in New Zealand, where the sailors have sexual relations with Maori women while George masturbates, and Tahiti, where he has a short sexual encounter with a local girl. In 1789 in Mainz, George meets Wilhelm and Alexander von Humboldt and journeys down the Rhine with the latter in 1790. They travel to England, where they visit James Cook's widow Elizabeth Batts Cook. On his return to Mainz, Therese is pregnant with Huber's child.