Now We Shall Be Entirely Free

Andrew Miller

Sceptre, £18.99

Review by Rosemary Goring

Like many historical dramas, Now We Shall be Entirely Free opens with a coach and horses being driven wildly through a rain-swept winter’s night. It is a time-worn cliche, but arresting. After we have heard the cracking of a whip and the neighing of exhausted horses, the focus usually shifts to the interior, where we meet the characters in whose company the tale will be spent. Not so here, as Miller’s central figure, who is indeed in the coach, is unconscious, near dead, and not in a position to speak for days.

Carried into a grand house in Somerset, where no one lives but the housekeeper, he is Captain John Lacroix, a cavalry officer, and one of the lucky survivors of the British army’s defeat in Spain, in 1809, by Napoleon’s troops. Laid like a corpse on a cold bed, he is slowly nursed back to health by his housekeeper. Some of the novel’s most memorable scenes come from its earliest pages, where Nelly tends to her young employer, washing and feeding and caring for him as he returns to life. Although she overhears him talking to himself, she learns nothing of the torment he is suffering, nor of his part in one of the most inglorious of the retreating British Army’s acts. Nor does she suspect the unfortunate role she too is soon to play.

Miller’s novels have always taken their inspiration from the dark side of the past. He is not gothic, but since his debut with Ingenious Pain, and subsequent novels like Pure, he has plumbed the more ghoulish corners of the past, be it the surgeon’s trade, or graveyard excavations in 18th-century Paris. With him, as with so much historical fiction, all roads lead eventually to a glimpse of death and putrefaction.

Although its title is dreamy, the plot of Now We Shall Be Entirely Free is anything but. Lacroix is finished with army life. When he is given a date for his return to barracks, he instead packs a bag and heads, first to visit his sister in Bristol, then for a boat to the Scottish islands, where he hopes to pursue his love of music. What he cannot know is that he has taken the first step in a game of cat and mouse, his pursuers proving relentless in their search. Strictly speaking it is not the military who is after him; not officially, at least.

Enter Corporal Andrew Calley, one of the most chilling fictional characters in a long time, and the most compelling element in Miller’s tale. In the headlong retreat to Corunna, Calley was under Lacroix’s command. Raised in the workhouse and utterly without scruple or soul, he was present when the British burned a Spanish village to the ground, lynching and raping its population. When an inquiry is held in Spain to determine the culprits, it is Calley – a witness to the deeds – who is charged with finding the man responsible. The scene where he is instructed to murder Lacroix is inky black, almost literally, since it takes place in an unlit room, deliberately dark so that he cannot see the high-ranking man who issues the order. Furthermore, to make sure he carries out his instructions, a Spanish soldier is to accompany him to England and confirm the execution has taken place.

Thus begins a most sinister pursuit, in which we see Calley and his associate slowly advance on their prey, feeling their way towards him and, in so doing, leaving behind a trail of violence and death. So far, so compelling.

It is on Lacroix’s arrival in the Hebrides that the novel loses not just pace, but power. There are vignettes of life on the islands, as bizarre to the Englishman as if they were Peloponnesians not fellow British, as when he is brought ashore on the back of a swimming cow. One recalls Samuel Johnson’s take on such scenes. Once there, the officer is given a room in the home of a group of English Wesleyans who are waiting to sail to America. One of them is a beautiful unmarried pregnant young woman, the other is pretty, with a mind of her own, and losing her sight. It is to her, Emily, that Lacroix is drawn, and what feels like an obligatory romance is sewn into the story. This takes them to a Glasgow hospital where she is operated upon, scenes that play to the author’s medical predilection, and where they finally learn of the hunters on Lacroix’s scent.

Miller is never less than a pungent, atmospheric writer. When Lacroix first arrives on the island, “The loudest sound was from the birds. They all sounded angry. And beneath the screeching, the growl of the sea, an old lion licking its paws.” But despite the occasional line of Gaelic, and a handful of Scots words, none of the chapters or passages set in the Hebrides, or Glasgow, carries an authentic note or mood of Scottishness. They are eerily uninflected and characterless, almost antiseptic, making you wonder why the plot took the officer there in the first place except as a convenient proxy for the ends of the earth.

A little heavy-handed also are the nods to the early 19th century. Among them are the latest theories in medical treatment – “we are learning many new things in our new hospital. We are learning, for example, to wash our hands”, says the eye surgeon – and the revolutionary geological discoveries of James Hutton, whose book Lacroix picks up in Glasgow: “Sweet Christ, it was impenetrable stuff! Yet he admired it, the way it came up honestly against the difficulty of knowing, the difficulty of saying, the difficulty of being clear.”

So from promising beginnings, Now We Shall be Completely Free comes disappointingly adrift. Even the conclusion of Calley’s murderous mission, the wire on which all events are to this point tensely strung, is oddly rushed and unsatisfying. By the story’s end, it feels less as if you have seen how war can make even a decent man heartless, and more that you’ve been given a history lesson, one that you did not necessarily need.

Andrew Miller is at the Edinburgh International Book Festival, August 23