The Testament of Gideon Mack
by James Robertson
Penguin/Hamish Hamilton
reviewed by Ben Oswest
An edited version of this review originally appeared in the 12 November 2006 Sunday Independent. Here’s the link for subscribers:
Strangely, I can’t find the original text of the review, before it was whittled down for newsprint - but what follows is the piece post the initial bout of whittling, which makes is slightly different from what appeared in the Independent (though still much truncated):
And on the third day he rose again. Gideon Mack, that is: the Scottish minister who set the North Sea hamlet of Monimaskit briefly aflame with scandal when, having fallen into the Keldo Water and been presumed irretrievably drowned for half a week, he miraculously reappeared, claiming it was the Devil himself that had saved him. Further, Auld Nick was now his friend. This is what passes for the premise of James Robertson’s new but rather worn novel, at least, and what’s interesting about it is that it’s laid out in full in the prologue – a sure clue that something’s up.
The sublime anti-novelist Joan Didion once observed (in a novel, appropriately enough) that part of the art of fiction comprises not telling readers what they do not – yet – want to know. The Testament of Gideon Mack is no anti-novel, but Robertson practices this dark art to the limit, and so somewhat misses its point. The main part of his book is wrapped, like the famous riddle, in a mystery, courtesy the prologue and epilogue, and in turn contains various enigmas – little texts and inventions here and there – that are ostensibly designed to conjure a wee spot of reflection on the ultimate puzzle, the question of the human soul. But there’s little delight to be taken in Robertson’s mixture of the contrived with the mundane, and so this hook, that we might otherwise agree to dangle on, is declined.
In outline, the book is actually three testaments. First, that of a publisher, who tells the story of how he came into possession of the infamous Gideon Mack’s manuscript, and who then summarizes its contents. Second, the manuscript itself, an autobiography that stretches the don’t-tell-the-reader device too far before the Devil, at last, is actually met and conversed with. Last, a report from an investigative journalist confirming most of the Earth-bound facts of Mack’s tale.
Robertson has thus invested quite a lot in building up this tale as something from the real world, rather than from his writerly imagination – and he’s invested even more in building up Mack himself. Too much, this reviewer would hazard. We are given the minister’s life in the close, self-indulgent detail of a tenth-rater’s memoir. Mack is born after Word War II. His father, also a minister, presides over a dour, discouraging household that Mack is happy to escape from by attending university in Edinburgh. He arrives there just in time to dabble in the counterculture of the Sixties – nothing too serious, mind you. He finds a few friends, a wife, Jenny, and, eventually – despite his confirmed atheism – a career in the Church of Scotland.
Mack enters the ministry because, at bottom, he’s lazy: he knows the job, having been to the manse born, as it were. (A manse is a minister’s residence in the Church of Scotland; it’s usually near the kirk, which is his church.) He settles in at Monimaskit, has a childless life with Jenny, who is later dispatched in a car crash (having served little purpose in the Testament), and then lives, alone and uneventfully, whilst the years creep by. In terms of life’s grand pageant – up until the moment when he plunges into the vestibule of the mouth of Hell – he seems to have arrived a few hours too late, when the confetti’s on the ground and the streamers are bowling around in the wind.
Meeting the Devil changes all that. Mr. Satan is, sinners will be glad to learn, a lonesome homebody just like Mack, and very kindly disposed to strangers. After the minister’s slip into the rushing Keldo torrent, the Lord of Misrule fishes him out, nurses him back to health in his cave, fixes his broken leg (“I can heal just as well as Jesusâ€?) and makes a date to meet him again on Ben Alder, the remote mountain halfway between Dundee and Loch Ness, for further adventures. Then he sends him back to Monimaskit, where the atheist minister, you may be sure, makes right fool of himself, telling everyone that fallen angels are just the tonic for beating life’s blues.
The Church of Scotland is known, today, for its progressiveness, but it remains fundamentally a church. Why Robertson’s narrative wades ponderously into the reactions of this church to Mack’s profanity, rather than ending on a high note – good news! butter doesn’t melt in the Devil’s mouth! – is anyone’s guess. In fact, here, it’s mine, so here goes.
Robertson is a writer of no small ambition (or, to be fair, ability – the Testament contains a number of solidly memorable passages interspersed with the many forgettable ones), and his book concerns itself deeply with issues that affect Scots identity in the modern world. It’s too long by half in its plodding trek over the last fifty years of Scottish history, as purveyed by a character who wears a dog collar. Only at the very end does the Devil actually come into it, though he’s the reason we’re turning the pages, and when he does, we are invited to consent in the scepticism surrounding Mack’s claims, a ploy that neatly brings the alternative into sharp relief. This alternative is, simply: a meaningless and rather dreary bourgeois existence in Scotland. In the 21st Century, Robertson seems to be saying, the Scots soul is damned if it belongs to a believer, and damned if it doesn’t. The Testament of Gideon Mack is a regional novel that has slipped under the fence, and come calling with quite curiously fusty and parochial news.
