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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. Having recently gotten into Literary Fiction, I was intrigued to read one of distinguished writer Andrew Miller's books. So when this came up, I jumped at the chance. It didn't take long before I was transfixed by the luscious, poetic prose, it had me practically mesmerised and soon I was wholly invested in the story. As a massive fan of Haruki Murakami, the intricate descriptions are very much something I enjoy, so, naturally, I absolutely fell in love with this book. Essentially, the novel explores culpability within the context and confines of the story. The second sentence in the book makes reference to the left hand horse of a pair in tandem and this simply makes no sense. 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.” War, it’s brutality, it’s deprivations and challenges could certainly bring out the best in some men, but inevitably, horrifyingly, it could also bring out the very worst in others.
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.” Oh yes, by the way, the “shameful secret” that Lacroix is seeking to escape is that he oversaw numerous war crimes during his time in the army and that’s why he’s being hunted - admittedly not a fantastic way to create sympathy for your lead character) 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. Miller’s writing can be strong, in landscape or weather and character. Calley in particular is an unceasingly hardened character clearly based on Wellesley’s famous possibly apocryphal quote about his Peninsular conscripts: my favourite is when some sailors spot some whales and while Medina wonders at them “Calley preferred not to look but made a face, a whale-hating face, that lasted several minutes”. 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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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.
Miller is interested, as a novelist, in the way in which physical defects and traits affect personalities. His debut, Ingenious Pain (1997), and his 2015 novel, The Crossing, contain protagonists who respectively cannot feel pain and have an immensely high tolerance to it. In this work, Lacroix’s hearing has been damaged by the war and Emily is going blind from cataracts. The result, for each, is heightened vulnerability and a slight withdrawal from a world that can no longer be fully perceived. Miller’s prose and dialogue make no obvious efforts to belong to the time in which the novel is set, and instead Miller relies on his copious and lightly displayed knowledge of period detail to give a flavour of the era. He has I think succeeded in that but failed in drawing in this reader – as perhaps my choice of opening quote indicates. Now We Shall Be Entirely Free is a historical novel, but it is also many other things - a war novel, a romance, an adventure story, a cat and mouse chase, a story of friendship. Above all it is a suspenseful story about one man running away from his past. On one level it is impressive to have a book which makes no attempt at post-modernism (other than using the names of those in the My Lai massacre for some of the characters), at allegory, or at drawing parallels with modern events (any hint of Brexit in the British retreat from Europe is purely accidental) – however, in my view, this robs historical fiction of much of its interest for me. 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”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. I heard Andrew Miller speak about this book at a Book Festival last year and I wasn’t sure I was going to enjoy it. It sounded too lyrical and too esoteric for my tastes – how wrong can you be!! I am struggling to find anything to niggle about as I was captivated throughout. 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. 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.
At one point, people sit round a dining table discussing John Clare’s poetry. But this is 1809 and Clare was not published until 1820.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. At the end of the book, although some elements of the story are resolved others, in the manner of a sea fret, are left opaque for the reader to reach their own conclusion about. He recalls how Penelope Fitzgerald, “a writer I adore”, claimed to always know the title, the first and last paragraphs, before she began writing. “And this time I kind of did.” It’s no spoiler to reveal that the title is also the last line. One of the challenges of the novel, he explains, was to make that idea of absolute freedom “not entirely ironic”.
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