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

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He is Captain John Lacroix, home from Britain's disastrous campaign against Napoleon's forces in Spain.

But as the story reaches its climax, the tension between action and withholding becomes increasingly problematic. Like several of his previous books – including his multi-awardwinning first novel Ingenious Pain (1997) and the Costa prize-winning Pure (2011) – Now We Shall Be Entirely Free is set in the early Romantic period, and like those precursors it plays no formal tricks and has no obvious ludic or cultural self-consciousness.

As characters traverse the length and breadth of the country, a Britain is evoked that seems entirely plausible and yet frighteningly strange.

The sun was rising swiftly and he saw that he was standing at the edge of a meadow, the grasses growing from sand, and in the grass myriad small flowers he had not been aware of when he came the first time, that must have been closed against the weather, the chill of evening.Now We Shall Be Entirely Free has many virtues--beautiful writing, interesting, quirky historical setting, a certain interest in narrative momentum—along with a killer vice, a rather light hand with historical verisimilitude, which ultimately problematizes the novel for me. He will not - cannot - talk about the war or face the memory of what took place on the retreat to Corunna.

It sounds like an old name for the river, but I can’t find any evidence it is an actual old name for the river. a novel of delicately shifting moods, a pastoral comedy and passionate romance story alternating with a blackly menacing thriller. The pacing of his story is excellent; his style is crisp; his apprehension of pain is arresting; and his ability to show people trembling at the edge of unreason is compelling. Whenever he leaves home, whether on campaign or on the road, he seems to be fleeced of the majority of his possessions. It struck me reading this that one of the pleasures of historical fiction is that it can’t take the world for granted, as a modern book can – everything that is different from our world has to be described or implied with language, has to be created afresh.Meanwhile in Spain a military court has found him guilty, and a violent and unscrupulous corporal is sent to pursue him with a Spanish soldier for company. Miller’s prose and dialogue make no obvious efforts to belong to the time in which the novel is set, and instead Miller relies on his copious and lightly displayed knowledge of period detail to give a flavour of the era. All the book’s perceptions are deftly given to his characters, with the double result that the observations feel peculiarly intimate, and the characters themselves come vividly to life. The main protagonist John Lacroix is possibly the most bland literary character I’ve ever encountered. I appreciated the inclusion of the Hebrides, but having holidayed on various of those stunning islands for many years, I couldn't understand the lack of detail and almost sparseness of the prose in those parts.

It throws out its big ideas with such lightness of touch that it’s only afterwards that the reader feels their sting. I also suspect, after reading Johanna Thomas-Corr's excellent review in The Guardian, that he doesn’t have a large following of UK readers either (or as large as he should), despite winning several awards, including Costa Book of the Year, as well as his having been shortlisted for the Booker Prize. I don’t feel the need to fact-check novels, whether set contemporaneously or in the early nineteenth century. Now We Shall Be Entirely Free follows John Lacroix, a soldier trying to escape his guilt-ridden memories of atrocities carried out by British soldiers in Spain during the Napoleonic wars, as he makes his way to the Hebrides; it also follows, in parallel, the two men–one English, one Spanish–dispatched to find him and hold him accountable for what happened. He fills his novel with vividly etched characters and has a way with words that delights, surprises and enthrals.Once I noticed some things wrong, I found myself spending more time fact checking than enjoying the story which was a shame because nearly all the facts are OK if you look into them. 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.

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