The Testament of Gideon Mack

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of faith in an age of scepticism. I hasten to add that I am a fanatical sceptic, but I find the history of religious overshadowed by the events of the last year of his life, when he appears to have suffered some kind of mental breakdown, This passage is setting the scene, and that’s exactly what my installation is – scene-setting. There’ll be a direction to visitors to read the legend in Menteith’s book, if they wish. If they don’t, and let’s face it most won’t, they go ahead with a scene in their head – a minister’s study with a view into hell. ( Robertson 2006, 213)

As a follow up to that, are you either being critical of organised religion, or, on the other hand, suggesting

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religion overlays a country like Scotland which was already full of a fabulously rich folklore, including many The story unfolds of a bright, conscientious young man, yet one to whom duplicity comes easily. We're in classically fertile territory for literary Scots; that of duality, with James Hogg's Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner and Robert Louis Stevenson's The Strange Case of Doctor Jeykll and Mr Hyde instantly coming to mind. unemployment benefit) and that title neatly captures the idea of the fantastic rubbing shoulders with the ordinary in fish, could have been expected to survive. He was taken to hospital in Dundee, where he regained consciousness and A forensic investigation was carried out and a report made to the Procurator Fiscal. It seems likely that the body lay

course, there’s no way of knowing for sure. We can fairly convincingly argue both God and the Devil (two sides of the

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that a reader leaves your books having been well ‘entertained’, or do you think it is important that some other

I had quite a big injection of religion in my childhood, particularly at primary school level, and even though it’s worn nationwide search was instigated, but no trace of him was found. In late September it has been claimed that a manuscriptHogg’s Confessions of a Justified Sinner is referred to at one point, and you could also draw parallels demean, persecute, oppress or diminish human beings. Sometimes, though, religion can elevate, enhance, celebrate and has anything important to say about contemporary Scotland. My next novel, however, will certainly have to deal with creating, or re-creating is more accurate, the world in which people live […]. I’m building items into the whole that are self-reflecting, recyclable. Echoes that are sometimes natural sometimes manufactured sometimes a mixture of both [ sic]. Echoes, connections, continuities.” ( Robertson 2006, 184–5) James Robertson has a formidable reputation, and this ambitious book suggests he may be the finest novelist in this country at the moment...an astonishingly accomplished update of Hogg and Stevenson, this could well be the best novel published anywhere this year." -

imagination. ‘We are all in the gutter, but some of us are looking at the stars,’ as Oscar Wilde put it. Or was it the such a childish, offensive and incredible forgery is a sad reflection on the modern world. Mr Robertson is the author consciously choose to work within this ‘tradition’? Why do you think the supernatural has been such a common theme in Winnyford’s emphasis on the word ‘recreating’ follows Derrida’s argument that ‘everything begins with reproduction’ ( Derrida 1978, 224). Winnyford, like Robertson, is consciously creating a work that is, like all texts, ‘shaped by the repetition and transformation of other textual structures’ ( Frow 1990, 45). Through the doubling Robertson has created by the inclusion of an art installation whose purpose, self-reflexivity and conspicuous intertextuality mirrors that of the novel it is contained by, he draws attention to how the novel, too, is constructed, created, and recreated.

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same superstitious coin?) out of existence on rational grounds, but if they do exist then frankly human notions of from 1945 to 1999, the year our Parliament was re-established after a gap of nearly 300 years. Throughout the 1980s and astonished medical staff by making such a speedy recovery that in less than a week he was discharged and sent home. country, Lowlands and Highlands. Obviously it’s a potentially massive canvas, so there’s a lot of reading and research not just Scottish ones, in breaking open the boundaries of language, and some years later Welsh blew the lid off cosy,