Good-Time Charlie’s Got the Blues : RESTORATION <i> by Rose Tremain (Viking: $19.95; 371 pp.) </i>

Beneath the picaresque surface of these ventures and tribulations of a comic follower of Charles II--England’s Merry Monarch--the wintry images glide like fish under pond ice.

Rose Tremain, an English novelist of arresting intuition, has written a religious story in pagan colors; a “Pilgrim’s Progress” in the garb of Tristram Shandy. “Restoration” is her novel’s title and period. Cromwell was dead, and England supposedly rid of Puritan zeal, proliferating sects and frowning righteousness. Charles had restored royal power, it seemed, and the enjoyment of the things of the world.

History, though, knows is no such thing as restoration. Charles’ buoyant early years were to be cut off by the Great Plague, the Great Fire and the ruinous cost of fighting the Dutch at sea. Religious dissent and the rise of a sober and hard-working middle class--which eventually conquered more for Britain than her aristocracy ever did--became a permanent part of national life. The Cavaliers had ousted the Roundheads, but from that time on, the Englishman would be, in uneasy synthesis, Cavalier and Roundhead both.

Robert Merivel is the silly erratic water wheel in these opposed currents. Son of the king’s glove maker, he has studied medicine, but his chance cure of one of Charles’ poodles has earned him a place in court. He is witty and voluble and partly a buffoon. In his greed for the court’s splendor and largess, he is happy to be poodle to the master he worships.

Charles is fond of Merivel and eventually conceives a use for him. He summons him one day and informs him that he is to marry Celia, one of the royal mistresses. He is not to be a real husband; he will simply provide a cover so that the No. 1 mistress, Barbara Castlemaine, will have fewer public reasons to fly into a rage.

In return for marrying and not consummating, Merivel will be knighted, receive a country estate, and enjoy a pension. He is overjoyed; it is all he has dreamed of. The wedding is a comic shambles--Merivel is togged up in an absurdly lavish costume designed by the king--and as soon as he and Celia retire to their chamber, Charles steps naked out of a closet and Merivel creeps away.

For a while, though, he is like Adam in Eden. He turns his 30-room mansion into a gaudy jewel, holds splendid dinners, makes love to a neighboring lady--Celia is in London--and sets out to be a painter. Medicine is too grim and penetrating; Merivel is part of the New Age, the Stuart Age, the age of surfaces.

He tells us all these things; and even as he does, his voice tells us that this man is more than the butterfly he aspires to be. Tremain has set a chilly premonition in the voice; From the start, we hear mention of his dearest friend and harshest critic, a fellow medical student named Pearce. Pearce is a Quaker, an earnest and upright man who, when he comes to visit Merivel’s estate, urges him to give it all up and come work with him in a hospice for the mad.

Merivel is too fond of his pleasures to agree. But his attachment to these pleasures is almost abstract; an ideological conviction yet crossed by uncertainties. As he speaks to us, we see a man praising his little kingdom while tormented by dreams of flood and invasion.

These arrive soon enough. Celia is returned by the king for being too demanding. A spell in the country will teach her sense. Merivel falls in love with her. When he tries to claim her, she indignantly flees back to London. Ill with measles and fright, Merivel is summoned by Charles, who torments him through a round of tennis before announcing his punishment.

“In trying to be the thing you were charged with pretending to be, you have rendered yourself useless,” the king says. Merivel’s estate and pension are confiscated; he must go naked out into the world. From the royal bounty, all he may keep are his horse and a set of beautifully fashioned surgical instruments.

Adam: expelled from the Garden, to earn his bread by the sweat of his brow. Gradually, Tremain has Charles take on an aspect of mystical kinghood. Merivel’s true punishment is being cut off from his Maker, but there is a hint of redemption at the end of time. Inside his box of instruments is a message from the king-turned-deity: “Merivel Do Not Sleep.”

The exile makes his way to Pearce at the Quaker hospice at Whittlesea in the Norfolk fens. As he rides, the landscape changes. Here is a sample of Tremain’s extraordinary rendering of the a voice of this moral wanderer.

“On the third day I rode on towards Willingham and I saw how the landscape became, as it were, less and the sky more and how the creatures most numerous were the birds, who had their existence in both elements. . . .

“And I observed how, in this fen land, the crust of the Earth appears thin, allowing water to seep and ooze upwards so that it is possible to imagine there are fishes and not worms in the soil. And it is a landscape of thin things--feathery marsh grasses and bulrushes and bending willows--so that I smiled when I thought of Pearce within it, thin and threadbare. . . .”

In the book’s second part, Merivel tells of his long subjugation to the work of caring for the mad; and of the six Quakers who have built a regimen of austerity without harshness. The community, where gentleness and rigor go together, is winningly portrayed. Merivel, the questing spirit, finds much to admire and learn from, but he is not sentimental. “The one great trouble about the Quakers,” he observes, “is that they are bossy, they do not let you dream.”

It seems for a while that he has found his home, but his flesh is weak and his pilgrimage is to be different. Eventually he is expelled--gently and sorrowfully--together with Katherine, an inmate who has seduced him and whom he has made pregnant.

They go to London; he works as a doctor through the plague. He bears the burden of daily life, without the two exaltations--royal and religious--that had sustained him until then. Although he flourishes modestly, he is in a state of desolation; he longs for his king. Eventually, after more trials, he will find him, in a dying transfiguration that suggests redemption.

“Restoration” sometimes loses control of its complex weaving of the comic, the adventurous, the historical and the religious. The first part, in which Merivel is a morass of contradictions that haven’t begun to sort themselves out, can seem choppy and arbitrary. Bit by bit, the originality of its voice and its dreamlike vision bind it together, and us to it.