James Robertson

'A book of such quality as to persuade you that historical novels are the true business of the writer.' Daily Telegraph

Joseph Knight

Stephen Campbell

“Nations and people are largely the stories they feed themselves. If they tell themselves stories that are lies, they will suffer the future consequences of those lies. If they tell themselves stories that face their own truths, they will free their histories for future flowerings.” – Ben Orki, Birds of Heaven

Optimist: I loved this inscription.

Cynic: Flowery words. Don’t you think the focus should be on the overwhelming evil of slavery rather than the rehabilitation of the country responsible for it?

Optimist: I don’t think it’s going for rehabilitation - it’s going for an honesty entirely missing from the Scottish historical narrative. Our view of our own history is flowery and romanticised. Scots consider Wallace and Bruce and the Jacobite rebellions as our true history and the Empire as somehow English business. This book’s great triumph is in exposing this lie. Joseph Knight’s slave-owner was out for Bonnie Prince Charlie at Culloden and it was immediately after the defeat that he fled to the colonies to build his slave enterprise. By the time he gets back to Scotland his contemporaries already see his old allegiances as romantic and quaint rather than political because by this time Scotland, former Jacobites and Hanovarians alike, are active and enthusiastic participants in slavery and the Empire.

Cynic: I was terrified as we got closer and closer to the end that Robertson was actually going for some dreadful “slave or slave-master; we’re all the same and it’s all part of our shared human experience” bullshit.
 
Optimist: He wasn’t though.

Cynic: No he wasn’t and thank Christ for that. But it did exemplify an actual problem with the book. A few other reviews have had an issue with Knight’s voice being left out of the majority of it and I have to say I agree. 

Optimist: I think the format was entirely appropriate and the build up to Joseph Knight’s ‘reveal’ (of sorts) is titillating. Throughout the novel we’re fascinated about who Joseph Knight will be, obsessed with the “impossible man with his impossible name.” And when we do eventually get to hear his voice he not only gets the final word but undeniably the definitive one.

Cynic: I’ll give you that the pacing is excellent for the first half and I found criticisms that Robertson got caught-up in minute historical detail wide of the mark, since the novel sweeps decades in only a few chapters. But it was the latter half which dragged. The book could have lost 100 pages, easily, and been all the better for it. Leaving Knight’s voice until last would have been highly effective in a shorter novel but as it stands there’s a point where the mystery of Joseph Knight stops being interesting and just becomes tedious.

Optimist: I had similar reservations about the second-half of the book but I think the final chapter made it all worth it. 

Cynic: It’s no 
  Gideon Mack
 is all I’m saying.

Optimist: Christ, will you stop with Gideon Mack. If you keep comparing Robertson’s other novels to Gideon Mack it’s your own fault if you continue to be disappointed.

Cynic: It's true though.

Optimist: You're unbearable.

Joseph Knight

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