The Fanatic
James Robertson
Fourth Estate £10, pp310
Buy it at BOL
There are few phrases to make the heart sink so fast as 'an historical novel, set in Scotland'. Though many Scots learnt their country's history from Sir Walter, Robert Louis and Nigel Tranter before it was properly taught in any schoolroom, these days we know wearily what to expect. It will be the atmosphere of damp kilts steaming in the heather as another file of Englishmen, bayonets or spears (depending on the era), glinting in the early spring sunlight, are seen making their way up the side of a burn where the ambush awaits them. The English, to be fair, have become just as bad - all those Napoleonic yarns, so many comforting boiled sweets in a fast-changing world.
So it is a cheering thing to be able to welcome a serious novel, mostly set in the 1670s, which has a lot to say about Scotland today, enmeshed in a homophobic backlash over Section 28 and half out of love already with the new Parliament on Edinburgh's Mound. This is a book which jostles its way into that select company of historical novels which have nothing to do with patriotic escapism - books such as Robin Jenkins's stunning The Awakening of George Darroch and the Neil Gunn/Naomi Mitchison political histories of the 1930s.
Above all, it harks back to that most influential of novels about Scottish presbyterianism, James Hogg's Confessions of a Justified Sinner. Here, however, there is more sympathy for the cause. The fanatic of the title is a would-be Presbyterian assassin, on the run for the attempted murder of the Archbishop of St Andrews, James Sharp. The intellectual excitement of religious revolution and the coarse, pervasive cruelty of seventeenth-century Edinburgh is brilliantly caught, a kind of grimy Protestant Petrograd but one in which, eventually, the Tsar would win.
The Presbyterian extremists, like the Leninists, seek refuge abroad (in the Low Countries), circulate violently incendiary underground leaflets, rely on safe houses and, when caught, endure revolting torture, the one-island gulag 'archipelago' of the Bass Rock prison and eventual execution in front of weeping crowds. Around this is the even darker tale of Scottish witch-hunting and burning and the utter corruption of the Restoration political élite a few decades before the Act of Union; in Robertson's Edinburgh, the coming Enlightenment is barely a glimmer on the horizon.
To recount this Scottish history now suggests a wish to warn and remind Scots of their darker side - historical fiction as destiny, not escapism. But Robertson is more explicit, by interweaving the 1670s with the late 1990s, when a ludicrous tourist 'ghost-trail' draws contemporary characters into the old stories just as New Labour's home rule revolution is on the horizon. The modern sections of the book feature another fanatic, an impoverished, semi-paranoid student intellectual, ranting into his mirror and increasingly obsessed with the martyred Presbyterian. He, too, is a type, a self-pitying Doric-Dostoevskian figure.
It's a novel, not a tract, and there is no 'message', but it is hard to finish this remarkable book without a strong sense that Scotland is darker and less glibly liberal than the establishment likes to think. It is, in many ways, more like Russia than England, or at least it has been so. And, perhaps most revealing of all, Robertson seems to prefer it that way. His contemporary characters are not happier than his seventeenth-century ones; lacking faith and heroic commitment, they are shallow drifters, more ghostly than the ghosts of their ancestors. If you want to understand why the Scots and Middle England will never get on, this is a better place to start than any work of politics.
