The Fanatic

Historical fiction about the Scottish Covenanters shot into prominence in the early nineteenth century, when Sir Walter Scott's The Tale of Old Mortality (1816) prompted both a firestorm in the press and the appearance of two more novels on the same theme, James Hogg's The Brownie of Bodsbeck (1818) and John Galt's striking Ringan Gilhaize (1823) [1].  Aside from that spurt of literary interest, however, only Robert Pollok's short stories about the persecutions managed to leave much of an impression (although the Covenanters remained a potent symbol in Presbyterian and some other Protestant circles). 

James Robertson's The Fanatic (2000)  returns to the Covenanters via a romance of the archive.  In 1997, on the brink of the elections, the bizarre Andrew Carlin--graduate school drop-out and general eccentric--takes a job on a "haunted Edinburgh" walk as the ghost of the infamous Major Thomas Weir.  Carlin, dissatisfied by the walk's potted history of Weir, decides to delve more deeply into his history.  Instead, he gets sidetracked by a mysterious librarian, who offers him an equally mysterious "secret book" purportedly written by John Lauder.  Carlin becomes increasingly fascinated by James Mitchel, executed in 1676 for a failed assassination attempt on Archbishop James Sharp; Mitchel may the titular "fanatic," but Carlin's obsession itself threatens to reach similar levels.  Meanwhile, back in the seventeenth century, we are offered a relatively non-linear account of Mitchel's career, pre- and post-imprisonment (including his relationship with Major Weir), along with Lauder's observations on seventeenth-century heresy hunting and Mitchel's kangaroo court trial.   

As the mysterious librarian with his otherwise unknown book suggests, Robertson's novel merges historical fiction, social satire (of which more in a moment), and elements of the Gothic.  Indeed, the "found" manuscript of either unknown or labyrinthine provenance is a staple of the Gothic genre.  In addition, the characterizations of both Weir and Mitchel clearly owe something to James Hogg's most (only?) famous novel, The Private Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner.  But more importantly, The Fanatic also draws on Justified Sinner's interest in doubling, a theme which here includes Andrew Carlin himself (he spends much of the novel talking to himself in the mirror), the novel's seventeenth-century/twentieth-century plot, and--according to Carlin's foul-mouthed mirror-self--the entirety of Scottish history: "...The last thing we need's anither split fuckin personality.  We've got mair than enough o them.  Fuckin Scottish history and Scottish fuckin literature, that's all there fuckin is, split fuckin personalities.  We don't need mair doubles, oor haill fuckin culture's littered wi them...."  (25)  For mirror-Carlin, this amounts to a diagnosis of national insanity--an entire country eternally at war with itself, psychologically and otherwise.   Whether there's a solution to this problem--or whether the problem can be solved--is quite another matter.

Of course, the novel's Gothic influences extend to ghosts.  Mr. MacDonald, the librarian, may well be an apparition, if not a hallucination.  Carlin's job, however, offers a more satirical critique of how Scotland continues to be "packaged" (or tartanized) for tourist consumption.  As editor Jackie Halkit sourly complains to Carlin's soon-to-be employer, Hugh Hardie, "You can't move around St Giles in the summer for folk like you trying to flog their wares to the tourists: what with all the ghoulies and ghosties and body-snatchers and stranglers, you'd think that Edinburgh history was one long overflowing bloodbath" (11).  Hugh's walking tour transforms historical traumas into both voyeuristic pleasure and cold hard cash.  On the tour, the ghost--that familiar symbol of a past which refuses to remain buried--offers a pleasant frisson to the tourist instead of a worrisome reminder of some unavenged crime or ongoing evil.   The tour substitutes the pleasures of sensationalism for actual knowledge; as Jackie notes after seeing Carlin "perform" for the first time, the guide's "words were not too important anyway.  They were history babble.  The effect was everything" (51).  The walking tour packages Scotland's past as barbaric, while rendering the Scottish present effectively non-threatening--the ghost, after all, is no ghost at all. 

For Carlin, however, the experience of playing Major Weir turns into its own haunting.  First, he finds himself dreaming the past, as though "the past isna past, it's right there happenin in front o me.  To me" (52); later, after he starts reading the Lauder MS, Carlin feels as though there is "[a]nother world coming through those old pages, invading him" (127).  The novel's most authentic "haunting," in other words, emerges in the act of historical research itself.  Reading about the past somehow unleashes it in the present, in a manner that is alarming (the past threatens to usurp the present) rather than soothing.

The violence of this particular haunting is hardly surprising, given that Carlin's research exposes an age of witch-hunting, religious fanaticism, and theo-political persecution.  John Lauder identifies himself as one with "progressive" ideas, but, as he admits, "we canna aye say this, we must steik oor gabs tae be wise, and dae oor day's darg and no challenge the kirk, or the state, or some o the prejudices and enthusiasms powerfu men hae" (72).  Lauder and his cousin, John Eleis, are both lawyers who seek to mitigate the worst effects of political cronyism and heresy-hunting, but Lauder's moderate theology and Eleis' atheism alike render them outsiders.  While Lauder dreams of a society governed by reason, not faith, he fears the effects of a different haunting: "Just because you lost sight of ghosts did not mean they had gone [...] Already he could see those who were most worldly in Scotland abusing power and despising law.  They were happy to let the eyes of others go on seeing the visions and horrors of the other world" (75).  In 1990s Edinburgh, where the ghosts are both sanitized and commercial, "seeing" ghosts is a pleasure--but also a sort of blindness, a blindness to the true meaning of history's bloody violence.  By contrast, 1660s politicians willingly blind themselves to the "ghosts," the better to forward their own self-interest--but also in the mistaken belief that religion serves as an opiate of the people. 

Certainly, the Covenanters are far from being tranquilized in this novel.  While the narrative lumps the persecutions of the Covenanters in with the witchhunting, it also firmly criticizes the Covenanters themselves for their fanatical certainty (a characteristic they share with the less appetizing politicos).  In the novel, certainty tends to generate more effective action than doubt; historical record to one side, it makes perfect thematic sense that the skeptical/liberal John Eleis and John Lauder have a much tougher time getting anything accomplished than either the corrupt politicians or the godly Covenanters.  (The twentieth-century Carlin is stuck in a rut for the same reason.)  But Major Weir's "assurance that I was saved" (188) allows him to interpret his incestuous desire for Jean as God's "impulse" (189), while Mitchel similarly believes that assassinating James Sharp is his divinely-ordained "purpose" (139).  Lauder, who is not certain, feels the "pity" (284) that Mitchel seems incapable of understanding; Mitchel's wife, Lizzie, decides in the end that "she was a better person for her uncertainty" (288). 

What the novel suggests in the end, then, is that certainty matters less than "possibilities" (302)--the possibilities opened up, for example, by the 1997 elections.  We see the aftermath of the elections through the eyes of Karen, a homeless woman to whom Carlin has given his Major Weir get-up. Walking through Edinburgh in the ill-fitting gear, Karen looks a sight--but, in the light of day, she also reveals just how ragged Hugh's "ghost" actually is.  While Karen feels understandably cynical about the outcome, her final reflections (on a reconstruction of Cook's Endeavour) offer a different mode of thinking about action: "You'd feel your way along familiar coasts and then you'd be off into the unknown.  You'd go blindly but you'd keep an eye out.  If you kept going forward you would eventually get to a place you recognised" (304).  While this position is its own form of certainty--after all, Karen supposes that the voyager eventually reaches "the familiar" once again--it also puts uncertainty at the center of experience.  Carlin similarly muses that "Jackie was right: life was all loose ends.  The past was never over, the future had always begun.  That was the terrifying thing: there was no end to life.  Like the sea, it was utterly oblivious of you" (306).  History is no longer an "invasion," but rather an ongoing presence--and one that cannot be banished by certainty. In the end, Lauder's "pity" for Mitchel dovetails with Carlin's suggestion that "[t]he only thing was to be recognised by someone else, however much of yourself you kept hidden.  To touch somebody, and not be forgotten by them" (306). 

[1]  Hogg denied any direct connection between Scott's novel and his own.  By contrast, Galt openly admitted that "[t]he book itself was certainly suggested by Sir Walter Scott’s Old Mortality..."