Now We Shall Be Entirely Free: The Waterstones Scottish Book of the Year 2019

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I still eye the Booker list, of course, but I am increasingly interested in the Walter Scott Prize for Historical Fiction, for one, which plays more predictably to my own preference for both good scene setting (yay, exposition! It says something , not quite sure what though, when the charachter chasing the hero is more fascinating than the actual hero. Miller's prose is stunning, and I found the story completely absorbing - the descriptions of Glasgow in the 1800s were some of the most striking for me. Meanwhile in Spain the English army is pressured to investigate war crimes English soldiers committed in Spanish village, the English and Spanish soldiers are sent to hunt the officer responsible.

Writing this review, I looked back over my previous reviews of Miller’s novels, and I was interested to see how ambivalent I had been right down the path. Historical fiction should have something to say about the present, and this does, yes, for in our age there are still atrocities that take place under the cover of war and shouldn't the perpetrators be held accountable? Miller is no conventional “historical novelist”, but he has set all his fiction to date in an Elsewhere. Miller's beautiful sentences are a joy to read and his engrossing novel, teeming with vivid historical detail, is as suspenseful as any thriller.

The newly built Glasgow Royal Infirmary is the centre of a storyline for pioneering treatment of glaucoma. None of this slows down the action, which is essentially a pursuit that starts as the military retreat to Corunna and ends in a manhunt among the Western Isles of Scotland. To appease the Spanish an English corporal is instructed to find the commanding officer and kill him. The pacing is also generally good, and the story feels authentic – and yet the novel does not cohere into a great deal more. To appease Spanish outrage an English corporal and a Spanish officer are commissioned to track down and kill the English captain in charge of the guilty soldiers.

Comments that contribute civilly and constructively to discussion of the topics raised on this blog, from any point of view, are welcome. Andrew Miller’s new novel combines these two ideas and it initially seems a travesty that Edugyan’s book sits on the Man Booker list and Miller’s has been passed over. He has I think succeeded in that but failed in drawing in this reader – as perhaps my choice of opening quote indicates. At least historical fiction doesn’t have the haircut problem that historical television invariably suffers from.The Frend family are foragers for historical evidence; they study rocks and are ardently opposed to meat eating. There we find that what’s really being fought out is not merely a battle for personal survival – since fugitive and pursuer are each witness to the other’s responsibility for what is a capital offence – but a class war.

Simultaneously nervous, choppy and unengaging, and at the same time we were suffering scenes after scenes that gave me nothing. While fighting in Spain, it eventually becomes apparent, he was witness to a My Lai-like massacre carried out by frightened, starving British troops against the small Spanish village of Morales. When John finds himself eating in the same hotel bedroom as Emily, Miller describes how: “Hehe could not get the word fucking out of his head. The wars of 1808-15 in the Iberian peninsula were an important episode within the Napoleonic wars generally, but historical recollection of them on the whole is not especially strong.The thriller nonsense that unspools from this plotline is relatively engaging, but I’m not sure this element of suspense was entirely necessary to keep me reading. Only towards the end of the book will he reveal the nature of those memories to a confidante to whom he has become close.