RESTORATION by Rose Tremain (Penguin: $10.95;...

RESTORATION by Rose Tremain (Penguin: $10.95; 371 pp.) Rose Tremain’s popular novel is more entertaining and faster-paced than Michael Hoffman’s leaden film adaptation. The narrator, Robert Merivel, is an indifferent medical student in mid-17th-century England; a curious chance brings him to the hedonistic court of Charles II to care for the king’s spaniels. Vulgar, idle and lecherous, the unprepossessing Merivel finds his true calling not amid the glittering distractions of the court but as a doctor serving victims of the plague and the Great Fire, after he has fallen from royal favor. The result is an amusing tale, marred only by a few clanging anachronisms.