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North Somerset, a moonless night in early 1809. A carriage with a half-dead soldier inside is struggling "through lanes crazy with rain, its sides slabbed with mud, its wheels throwing arcs of mud behind it".
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. When he eventually arrives, he is not as alone as he imagined he would be. Already ensconced on the island is a small family of idealists, living their utopian dream in much the same way that Coleridge and others planned to do on the banks of the Susquehanna River. 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. 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. From his first novel, Ingenious Pain, 20 years ago, Miller has displayed a desire to play with the past in a dexterous and original fashion, finding curious stories at the edges of history and weaving long and fascinating novels around them. This skill was shown at its best in the triumphant Pure, which was set in the graveyards of 18th-century Paris and was one of the most sensory novels of the last 10 years, each sentence steeped in the sights, sounds and smells of a city that did not know what to do with its dead. A British cavalry officer fleeing traumatic memories seeks solace on a Scottish island, but his new refuge may not be remote enough to let him escape a dangerous enemy.A sky full of air balloons. Balloons driven by steam …. Sightseers would fly to the islands from London, drop anchor in a spot like this, swarm around with their sketch books, then up a ladder again and off to … Iceland. Greenland. America” At the age of 17, living just outside Bristol, Miller experienced “a little epiphany”. “It was A-levels. I was at home. It was summer. I was coming to the end of reading The Rainbow.” He describes himself as “an unashamed Lawrentian” and put off reading Women in Love because he wanted it always to be in the future. To the young Miller, Lawrence made writing seem a “noble enterprise” and that to pursue it would be “to begin a wonderful life. This is about how you transform yourself, others, the world. It’s your politics. It’s a kind of revolution.” His father was a doctor. "My Beano and Dandy were the BMJ and the Lancet” While the central focus of the book is on the truth of events surrounding the actions in Los Morales, and then the chase for Lacroix driven by Calley; the clever, underlying sub plot concerns Emily and the Scottish Islands community of which the Frends are a part. Emily and her sister, Jane, have come under the influence of commune leader, Thorpe. 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?
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.
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Cawley is an English corporal, a liar with secrets he needs to hide.....he is also pure evil.....along with a Spanish officer, he is tasked with following Lacroix, and eliminating him. But overall I found this an uninteresting book – far too masculine: the author has stated he was looking to reproduce “the kind of energetic adventure stories” he read and loved as a boy. 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. I literally just finished the book and yet I would still struggle to tell you anything significant that happens in it - for some reason the majority of the story revolves around a woman’s decision to have eye surgery?
The pacing… It was peculiar. Simultaneously nervous, choppy and unengaging, and at the same time we were suffering scenes after scenes that gave me nothing. 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. 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. 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. I am not at all sure about referring to the river in Liverpool as the River Mercy. It sounds like an old name for the river, but I can’t find any evidence it is an actual old name for the river.The central tension for the reader is that Lacroix, despite his taciturn nature and his obvious war damage, seems like a decent man. He’s a 19th century version of Walker from The Long Take. It is impossible, really, not to start to believe in him and want him to recover and be happy. Can he really be the man behind the atrocity that Calley is seeking and will ruthlessly kill when he finds him? His father, a doctor (“my Beano and Dandy were the BMJ and the Lancet” – hence, perhaps, all those corpses in Miller’s fiction), was not thrilled at his chosen path. But Miller, who left school with one A-Level, had “a ridiculous faith” that it would happen, and at 22 an essay on Lawrence led to a place at Middlesex Polytechnic to read humanities: “philosophy, history of ideas, which was perfect for me”. His confidence only began to falter when he hit his 30s: “Who was I kidding?” He enrolled on the now legendary creative writing MA at the University of East Anglia, catching the glory days when Malcolm Bradbury and Lorna Sage were still teaching. The novelist Rose Tremain was also one of his tutors and he began Ingenious Pain at the end of that year. “It felt as if I was writing to save my life.” 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. Miller won the Costa book award with his novel Pure in 2011. Photograph: Martin Argles/The Guardian The joy of reading an Andrew Miller novel is his obvious passion for story and sensual language, and his ability to interweave the two seamlessly. The former is an often-forgotten art form in the contemporary novel, which often seeks to impress rather than entertain, but the latter is what makes him one of the most impressive novelists at work today.
What you really need to know is what the underwear is. Once you know what they’ve got on underneath then you are kind of there,” the novelist Andrew Miller explains over a cup of tea in his Somerset kitchen. “Eighteenth-century underwear, particularly women’s, was very complicated. Either there was none at all or vast amounts of it.”The main protagonist John Lacroix is possibly the most bland literary character I’ve ever encountered. There’s nothing complex or compelling about him at all. Instead, all the most interesting parts of the book come through Corporal Calley - the psychopathic soldier hired to hunt him down - who spends the entire story pursuing Lacroix only to be instantly shot dead the moment he finds him - no dramatic face-off or anything. He drank a glass of wine. He didn’t want anything stronger. He was experimenting with clarity, with time in its ordinary clothes." The great dome provides the main source of light for operations to take place (despite patients having to be carried up stairs)! Radical developments in hygiene (i.e the washing of hands) are cited as evidence of the new modernity.. Eye surgeon, Mr Rizzo states that he is a follower of the Spallanzani school. Happily, it paid off. The success of Ingenious Pain – which won one of the literary world’s richest prizes, the Impac award – was “very unexpected and glorious”, he says. “The gods had showered me, a level of generosity that slightly alarms you. Immediately I felt, there’s a hammer swinging somewhere. But I had the sense to just relish the moment.”
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