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

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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. John soon finds himself enthralled by this forthright, complex woman and, when they travel to Glasgow for a high-risk eye operation, the air is thick with both sexual tension and carbolic acid. Now We Shall Be Entirely Free opens in 1809, shortly after the Spanish campaign of the Peninsular war. Although Lacroix keeps mum while travelling, we have seen enough of his mind by this stage to know that he feels himself to be “at the edge of something” (breakdown, paranoia, confession), and understand that the appeal of a remote island has something to do with finding a physical place that matches his interior mood.

Why Emily was so forgiving (immediately so), when she heard John Lacroix speak of his appalling lack of leadership and inaction at Los Morales. At the end of the book, although some elements of the story are resolved others, in the manner of a sea fret, are left opaque for the reader to reach their own conclusion about. In other words, the new novel again combines a forward-diving narrative with the description of a state of bafflement. 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).

The linear design of the novel gives it a lot of forward momentum, but not so much that you want to rush through Miller’s wonderful prose, which is resonant without ever being florid or overly ornamental. I would recommend this novel to anyone with a love for exquisite writing, the Napoleonic time period, and unforgettable characters.

He sets out to escape being forced back into service, to escape his own conscience and, if possible, seek some redemption.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. Whenever he leaves home, whether on campaign or on the road, he seems to be fleeced of the majority of his possessions. a novel of delicately shifting moods, a pastoral comedy and passionate romance story alternating with a blackly menacing thriller. The resemblances it bears to other novels – in particular Robert Louis Stevenson’s Kidnapped and The Master of Ballantrae – feel more like shadows falling across the text than knowing references. At the same time a pyschopathic English corporal and a refined Spanish cavalry officer are sent from Lisbon to wreak justice on Lacroix in penance for a British Army atrocity.

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