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

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Winner of the Highland Book Prize, shortlisted for the Walter Scott Prize and a book of the year for the Guardian, the New Statesman, the Spectator and BBC History Magazine Lacroix falls in love with one of the Frends, Emily, whose eyesight is as bad as his hearing. She’s going blind from what seems to be glaucoma, and they travel to Glasgow in search of medical help. There, with Lacroix at one point unwittingly sharing a bed with Calley’s companion, the suspense story turns into a romance of sorts, the most predictable part of the novel, though Miller does his best to enliven it with some fascinating medical scenes. Emily and Lacroix have the good fortune to come across a doctor who not only can operate on her eyes, with a scalpel as fine as a needle, but also believes in washing his hands. Eventually, in a long monologue, Lacroix reveals his secret, which is pretty much what we imagined, and Emily decides it doesn’t matter. In perhaps the book’s strangest moment, neither seems much affected by the morally troublesome. Playfulness and pastiche have crept in to historical fiction in recent years. A cunning example is Francis Spufford’s Golden Hill, set in New York in the 1740s, and itself an imitation of an 18th-century novel. Spufford offers his book as “a colonial counterpart to Joseph Andrews or David Simple”, bestselling novels of the 1740s by brother and sister Henry and Sarah Fielding, respectively. Both employ guileless heroes, set loose in a guileful world. Golden Hill’s hero, who has arrived from London in this dangerous town, appears to be an innocent, yet turns out to be anything but.

Now We Shall Be Entirely Free, which opens in 1809, records the aftermath of Napoleon’s rout of the British in northern Spain. In that chaotic retreat, atrocities are carried out by British soldiers. Afterwards, justice demands that someone be held responsible. But who is more to blame: the brutalised rank-and-file perpetrators, who have themselves been subject to a lifetime of abuse, or the officer whose intervention, when it comes, is too little, too late? At what point does the pursuit of justice itself become an atrocity? And how many innocent, collateral deaths are an acceptable price for one individual’s survival? This is an extremely well written and very enjoyable novel. Miller writes beautiful, yet accessible prose which I find quite compelling. The book is also a great adventure story, reminiscent of many written by John Buchan. Apparently Miller set out to reproduce the kind of boy’s adventure story he enjoyed so much when he was a child – I think he has entirely succeeded in achieving this aim. The tension mounts as the pursuers begin to close in, culminating in a gripping climax. The characters that we meet along the way are all plausible (although not all are pleasant), and there is a smattering of eccentricity among the local characters which adds interest. Miller is also particularly good at evoking atmosphere within a given landscape. He is in his element in the Hebrides and I could picture the scenes vividly, but his descriptions of city life were equally convincing.On the contrary, this novel pulls the past close. What makes other times and places recognisable and relevant is the similarity to us of the people who inhabit them. Indeed, surely one of the most pressing ethical obligations of our own time and place is to recognise ourselves in the other. Miller’s latest novel is a compelling read and an important literary achievement, not least because it does just this.

The story's very ambiguity steadily feeds its mysteriousness and power, and Danielewski's mastery of postmodernist and cinema-derived rhetoric up the ante continuously, and stunningly. One of the most impressive excursions into the supernatural in many a year.The novel’s Peninsular Wars setting was something that attracted me to it (I enjoyed Thomas Hardy’s evocation of that period in The Trumpet Major). 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. In Jura, in a boarding house, they sat out two days of the storm, the weather dementing against the windows so that they dared not sit too close for fear the glass would come in. He is unruffled by his new novel not making it on to this year’s Man Booker longlist. “You spend the day feeling obscurely offended and depressed,” he says cheerfully. “But it is just one day.” He recalls how Penelope Fitzgerald, “a writer I adore”, claimed to always know the title, the first and last paragraphs, before she began writing. “And this time I kind of did.” It’s no spoiler to reveal that the title is also the last line. One of the challenges of the novel, he explains, was to make that idea of absolute freedom “not entirely ironic”.

Ultimately, this is a book about the horrors of war, and what it does to the humans who are involved in it.....the ordinary men who took up arms and went off to fight for causes that they possibly didn’t really understand.....wars that were caused by men who craved power, who needed to dominate others. Well, I'm glad that I'm now entirely free from that appallingly tedious experience. I mean I'm flummoxed, I really am. This was such an underwhelming read, but I suppose I should be glad really, glad that I haven't encountered anything this bad for a long time.Andrew Miller is a compelling wordsmith, and for that reason he is on my list of authors whose novels I read “automatically.” 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. It might seem strange to describe an author who has won the Impac Award and the Costa Book of the Year, and been shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize – all with separate books – as underrated but, nevertheless, it does feel that Andrew Miller does not always receive the laurels that his eminent career deserves. I approached Now We Shall Be Entirely Free with high expectations and a certain bias. Even though I had yet to read the novel, I had high hopes of it making this year’s Booker longlist and I was quite ‘vocal’ in expressing both those hopes as well as my great anticipation of its publication. I was disappointed when the novel wasn’t longlisted, even more so now that I have read it. I'll quote from Johanna Thomas-Corr review in The Guardian: the fact it’s not made this year’s Man Booker longlist is already something of a travesty. I loved the beginning. And I kept liking this book less with every chapter until I was pushing myself towards the finish line, hoping I can still enjoy something in the book. I did not. I cared so little that I wasn’t even curious about revelations about the mystery that drove the whole chase (and it was obvious in the middle of the book, I waited for a twist that never came). All Miller’s novels create alternative worlds in which their author experiments with emotional and moral concerns. Through his hyper-real evocation of the times and places he chooses, he invites us in to join these experiments. Yet one of the chief, if incidental, joys of Entirely Free is that, although set two centuries ago, it is free of both appalling “ye olde” speak and the superabundance of “it’s different from us” research material, about the names of furnishings, costumes or types of rein for example, that deaden much period writing.

He has I think succeeded in that but failed in drawing in this reader – as perhaps my choice of opening quote indicates. The book that got him over this impasse was, appropriately, The Crossing, published in 2015, which he calls his “crazy novel” about a troubled marriage, in which the reader is adrift on a boat with the inscrutable Maud. “It felt like just jumping off a high board in the dark. That sense of taking a big enough risk, a certain foolhardiness that perhaps was enough to re-engage my interest. I don’t have a cool way of writing. It’s not how I am and it’s not how I like to write Now We Shall Be Entirely Free is a historical novel, but it is also many other things - a war novel, a romance, an adventure story, a cat and mouse chase, a story of friendship. Above all it is a suspenseful story about one man running away from his past. The All Seeing Eye represents a higher power keeping watch over humankind - a symbol of protection, good karma and inner peace. Lucia (from the Latin word "lux" which means "light"). In paintings St. Lucy is frequently shown holding her eyes on a golden plate.I bought this new from Waterstones, and if my memory serves me well, the man that served me even recommended it as a 'Must read'. The beautiful cover is the only redeemable aspect of this sorry tale and even then, I can't bring myself to mark it up a star solely because of that. As Calley closes in, we are reminded again of both the strengths of Miller’s procedures, and their limitations. 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 un-reason is compelling. “Even the most sensible people have an edge of lunacy to them,” he writes at one point, “like fat on a cutlet.” But as the story reaches its climax, the tension between action and withholding becomes increasingly problematic. It’s not just that Lacroix is reticent, and that so much action happens off stage or invisibly. It’s also that when Lacroix does finally confess the full story of what happened in Spain, he reveals a paralysis in himself that we are never entirely convinced has been cured. Is this plausible psychology? Possibly. Does it show a conflict in Miller himself, between his appetite for writing a historical yarn and something quieter, more subtle and more inward? This seems just as likely. He drank a glass of wine. He didn’t want anything stronger. He was experimenting with clarity, with time in its ordinary clothes." Then she stood a while in the odd grey light of the snow, looking at the soft confusion of footprints by the door of the house.