The Testament of Gideon Mack

James Robertson's The Testament of Gideon Mack is not a historical novel, precisely, but it is a novel haunted by the history of Scottish fiction.  And, along those lines, it wonders how Scotland can tell its own story in a world that is, among other things, quite possibly deserted by God.   The testament in question belongs to atheist minister Gideon Mack, who, we are told in the "editorial" frame narrative, has died under mysterious circumstances on Ben Alder.   During his tenure in (the imaginary rural village) Monimaskit, Mack became a fundraising celebrity of sorts.  However, when he falls into the legendary Black Jaws while trying to rescue a fellow minister's dog, Mack encounters the Devil himself.  (The devil turns out to be a sympathetic fellow, if somewhat touchy.)  When, in a parody of a revival preacher's spiel, Mack insists on testifying to his experience, the Church of Scotland--not to mention everyone else--denounces him as, to say the least, not entirely sane.  This testament before us, then, constitutes Mack's final confession before he departs for his rendezvous with the Devil on Ben Alder. 

As a child, Gideon Mack reads and rereads the novels of Sir Walter Scott--the only fiction that his father, a clergyman, has allowed to remain in the manse.  And while Scott would not necessarily recognize The Testament of Gideon Mack as a historical novel, The Testament is nevertheless preoccupied with historical transformation and loss in a way that is very much Scott. As the 60s and 70s take hold, Mack's father fades away along with the Church's power; symptomatically, he suffers his first stroke after he catches Gideon watching Batman on the Sabbath.  Television and film turn out to herald a new and increasingly global age, defined above all by America's cultural exports, America's wars, and America's money.   "The sixties was an American decade," Gideon muses; "the Americans might have gone home after the war, but they were back in these years, influencing the form of music, books, art, fashion, social attitudes" (51).    The result is classic Scott: characters become all too aware that the old ways are dissipating under the pressure of historical change.  To what extent, then, is it possible to bridge the gap between "now"  and a lost "then"? To some characters, this new global era seems to dissipate all human emotion, all sense of purpose, even all sense of politics.   John, one of the historians in the novel, complains that "'[n]obody feels, nobody cares any more.  There are no causes left.  Even Scotland doesn't feel like a cause anybody's going to get angry about" (219). But John's pessimistic vision of a disenchanted world gone virtual,  in which the cinema (220) supplants religion as the primary means of making personal meaning, does not hold sole sway over the novel.  The arthritic (and marijuana-smoking) local historian Catherine Craigie proposes that the Mexican Day of the Dead might model a way for the living to commune with those who have gone.  Despite being an atheist, Catherine wants to be buried with her family because her lost religion has nevertheless shaped her idendity.  Meanwhile, the newfangled William Winnyford, who produces multimedia historical installations, argues that his work enables audiences to see "the world in which people live, bits of it that are always there but which they don't always pay attention to" (184).  In this "multi-dimensional" (220) understanding of lived experience, there are moments that Winnyford calls "conjunctions," at which "space, time and narrative overlap" (185).  For Winnyford, history always silently informs the present in unexpected and sometimes invisible ways; the gap between past and present remains, yet the past is simultaneously of the present as well.  Depending on where we are in The Testament of Gideon Mack, any or all of these historical models may be in play. 

The novel's unwillingness to "say what it means" on this subject suggests that it drifts along with modern Scotland, instead of regarding Scotland from some fixed point outside. It is not, in fact, clear where "outside" might be.  According to the Devil, while both he and God used to have a "purpose," now they too are adrift: "Basically, I don't do anything any more.  I despair, if you want the honest truth.  I mean, the  world doesn't need me.  It's going to hell on a handcart, if you'll excuse the cliché, without any assistance from me" (295).  While the Devil has stuck around, God has apparently "gone" (295).  This is less a death-of-God thesis than a God-has-something-better-to-do-with-his-time thesis.   God has apparently abandoned his creation to its own devices, leaving even the Devil to twiddle his thumbs aimlessly while he watches humanity implode.  Given that this is the Prince of Lies who's speaking, the reader may wonder if we're to take the Devil straight, especially since he not only kept company with Gideon's father, but also may have been responsible for Gideon's college scholarship.  Far from passively watching the Macks, the Devil appears to have been giving things a strategic nudge now and then.  Moreover, it's worth noting that the Devil's thoughts aren't original to the Devil--his pessimistic view of an unmoored modernity lines up nicely with John's anger over lost "causes."  And here is where Gideon's status as a wildly unreliable narrator comes in.

In and of themselves, unreliable narrators don't necessarily tell us anything interesting.  Gideon's unreliability, however, goes straight to the novel's core questions: what story does modern Scotland want to tell about itself, and where will it find a model? By the time that the frame narrative is over, we have learned that a) Catherine Craigie has lied to Gideon; b) Gideon has lied about his affair with Elsie, to the point that nothing he says on the subject can be trusted at all; and c) Gideon's representation of William Winnyford is, at best, somewhat unfair.  This calls everything else into question--like Gideon's encounter with the Devil.  But for lack of a better word, Gideon's unreliability is structured by other fictions.  The encounter with the Devil in the Black Jaws is partly inspired by a possibly faked bit of "traditional" lore (a fiction of a fiction inspiring a fiction in a work of fiction...).  The narrative's sense of history, as I said, derives from Scott, as does the neo-Covenanter Peter MacMurray and even Gideon's own father (the "arms that reached almost to his knees" [51] echoes Rob Roy--James Mack comes up just a little short of Scott's hero).  When he applies for the ministerial position at Monimaskit, Gideon's approach to the sermon is inspired by Lewis Grassic Gibbon (135).  His death on Ben Alder comes out of his fondness for R. L. Stevenson.  And, of course, there's Gideon rueful sense that he has failed to live up to his Biblical namesake.   Implicitly or explicitly, Gideon's "testament" braids itself into other narratives; his unreliable voice in part ventriloquizes other, more "authoritative" speakers. 

But Gideon never discusses the two most important influences on the testament.  As this interview with Robertson notes, the novel's most obvious affiliations are with Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde and The Private Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner; nevertheless, Gideon never mentions the former (odd, since he's so enamoured of Stevenson), and the "editor" claims that there's no sign that he had read the latter  (also odd) (355).   The reader can tick off the influences as she goes: unreliable narrrator, hypocrisy, doubling, chain of textual transmission, Gideon's own initials/the Devil's name ("Gil Martin"), protagonist's decay from respectability to moral outcast, frame narrative (a crossover with Scott), and so on.  Given Gideon's track record, it's possible that he suppresses his literary ancestors in order to establish his own narrative voice--a rejection of the past that, in good Gothic form, comes back to haunt the tale.  Or, perhaps, Gideon's voice takes its form from novels that have  entered the national consciousness--a forgotten past that nevertheless acts on the present.  Or, within the world of the novel as a novel, literary ancestors themselves become "real"...

Ultimately, Gideon's great sin is to claim that he speaks the truth.  After Catherine Craigie's unorthodox funeral, he assembles the mourners and tells "them everything that I have recorded here.  I mean everything" (341).  This moment of apparently perfect non-hypocrisy ignites a wild storm of speculation, anger, and disbelief; after all, who sees the Devil in twenty-first century Scotland? But the great difficulty, of course, is that "everything that I have recorded here" is unreliable--although, arguably, this problem no longer matters much by the end of the novel.  In the end, what the novel captures is the end of a particular form of religious experience: meeting the Devil in twenty-first century Scotland no longer makes any sense, not even to those who actually believe that the Devil exists (e.g., Peter MacMurray [372]).  Gideon's experience, whether or not he "really" had it, no longer makes sense as experience.  It can only make sense as fiction.  In that sense, Gideon winds up reclaimed by the novels that give shape to his voice.