Now We Shall Be Entirely Free

"We’re lucky to live in the era of Andrew Miller. Now We Shall Be Entirely Free is just the latest in a series of remarkable novels, each of which is so fresh, so vivid, that I sometimes wonder if he’s possessed of magical powers. He doesn’t just make you see sea or snow, or a man after he’s been shot, or a cow being ridden ashore, but feel the swell, the cold, the flowering of blood, the sway of the cow’s hips. It’s a great skill, dramatically honed. In this particular book, we find ourselves in the aftermath of the British army’s withdrawal from Corunna, six years before Waterloo, in the company of Robert Lacroix, a good man who, so the reader learns in incremental steps, leaves bad things in his wake. As Andrew Miller tells us, the book’s origins were musical, “specifically a little piece called ‘Mary Young and Fair’” collected by “a military type in the Hebrides in 1815.” Such a peaceful genesis for the story of a man on the run from both himself and (though he learns this late on in the novel) from a real pursuer. If you haven’t yet read Now We Shall Be Entirely Free , set aside a weekend. Once begun, it’s hard to put down. To me, emphatically no. We don’t even really understand our contemporaries! And then there’s the burden of hindsight. If you write about the Second World War , for example, no matter how hard you try, you can’t forget the destruction; you can’t forget the concentration camps; and most crucially of all, you can’t forget who won. If you’re writing about the 13th century, you’re never really going to know what it was like getting up in the morning. As Andrew Miller said in his shortlist interview, “the past is held in the belly of now.” Not, he says, that “everything is merely a matter of subjective interpretation.” It’s more complicated than that! Helpfully, he sends us to the start of ‘Burnt Norton’, the first of T S Eliot’s Four Quartets . Have a look and see what you think."