Miller’s new novel, Now We Shall Be Entirely Free seems bent on defying convention and expectations ... what begins as if it might be a full-immersion historical novel...quickly becomes instead a psychological mystery ... The book’s relation to history is more complicated than in Miller’s other novels. At times he suggests that the past and the present greatly resemble each other ... At other times he’s at pains to point out how backward they were in the early 19th century ... Even more often, Miller emphasizes not so much the pastness of the past as its strangeness, dwelling on details remarkable just for their oddity ... In its formal slipperiness, first one kind of book, then another, Now We Shall Be Entirely Free seems to be making the...point: that things are never quite what you expect, and history is altogether stranger than most accounts suggest. What makes Miller’s own account so riveting is its alertness to wonder and unpredictability.
It’s a wonder Andrew Miller is not a household name ... Perhaps his excellent eighth book...will change that, though the fact it’s not made this year’s Man Booker longlist is already something of a travesty ... Now We Shall Be Entirely Free is a novel of delicately shifting moods, a pastoral comedy and passionate romance story alternating with a blackly menacing thriller. It is also a book of ideas: about male violence, the impact of war and the price of freedom. Miller anchors the action in precise, convincing detail...But there’s an intimacy to the way he inhabits his characters that makes them feel modern and natural ... Miller understands that the past is not something separate from us. His wry dialogue is a particular treat, but he can also write with a lovely, soulful stillness.
...a deep historical sense and generous material detail with truly diabolical suspense ... The chase, as it may be called, is an enthralling and labyrinthine one over land and sea ... This is a completely engrossing novel, rich in the details and feeling for a vanished age, deft in character portraits, and almost unbearably suspenseful. It is, in fact, the sort of book that takes more will power than I normally possess to prevent myself, while reading it, from turning ahead to the last page. I held myself back, though, and was duly rewarded.
Now We Shall Be Entirely Free...is simultaneously a historical novel, a thriller and an exploration of the forms redemption may take. The plot grips and surprises. Miller’s prose remains poetic and taut, with an eye for the telling detail...And he excels at creating characters who are defined, but not limited, by a specific time and place, not just Lacroix, Calley and Medina but the minor players too. Historical or otherwise, this is fiction — storytelling — at its best.
Mr. Miller strikes an impressive balance between adventure and atmosphere. As in a good thriller, madness bubbles beneath the surface of the scenes, especially those involving Calley, whose version of the massacre grows less reliable as his monomania for finding Lacroix intensifies ... But while the threat of violence keeps the story’s wheels in motion, its greatest pleasures owe to its unhurried, ambulatory pacing. Mr. Miller takes his time describing the parallel journeys to the Scottish wilderness, and as he fills the chapters with rich, scenic details he disperses the fog of secrecy obscuring past events ... Freedom arrives in this lush and satisfying novel not by way of escape but from a final confrontation with the truth.
[Miller's] gifts are on display once again in Now We Shall Be Entirely Free, a novel that would not feel out of place in the collected works of Robert Louis Stevenson, Walter Scott or, indeed, alongside William Golding’s To the Ends of the Earthtrilogy ... The joy of reading an Andrew Miller novel is his obvious passion for story and sensual language, and his ability to interweave the two seamlessly. The former is an often-forgotten art form in the contemporary novel, which often seeks to impress rather than entertain, but the latter is what makes him one of the most impressive novelists at work today.
Miller is not one of those novelists who puts 21st-century pieties into the mouths of historical characters. Instead, as John heads northwards, Miller paints a richly detailed portrait of a society in some ways familiar, in others impossibly strange. Startlingly exact details accrue, of life on board ship, how to make cartridges for a gun, or the (literally) cutting edge of contemporary eye surgery. Miller takes delight in loose ends and dropped threads, introducing characters who are distinctive and surprising rather than essential to the plot ... Outlaws, whores, clerks, naval men and tavern-keepers add to the sense of a teeming world ... Miller is always interested in something more profound than mere action. Here, a moment spent looking at flowers in a meadow or into the wondering eyes of a horse has as much significance as the gravest peril.
There are fights, missteps, hard journeys on horseback, in coaches and on ships. Nothing violent or sexual is detailed too graphically—just suggestions offered of what occurred. Instead, Miller keeps readers engaged in other ways. Characters are richly developed. Places are meticulously described. The dialogue is plausible, authentic, with a few Spanish and Gaelic words sprinkled in. The tale builds to a climax, a reckoning, if you will. The ending offers a twist or two and, even after 400-some pages, you want a little more. Not all story lines are neatly tied up at the end. But all in all, this is escapism at a compelling level.
Now We Shall Be Entirely Free is set in the early Romantic period, and like [its] precursors it plays no formal tricks and has no obvious ludic or cultural self-consciousness ... John Lacroix, is closed off from those around him. In other words, the new novel again combines a forward-diving narrative with the description of a state of bafflement. Miller’s principal means of operation and his principal character pull in different directions ... we are reminded again of both the strengths of Miller’s procedures, and their limitations. The pacing of his story is excellent; his style is crisp; his apprehension of pain is arresting; and his ability to show people trembling at the edge of un-reason is compelling ... But as the story reaches its climax, the tension between action and withholding becomes increasingly problematic. It’s not just that Lacroix is reticent, and that so much action happens off stage or invisibly. It’s also that when Lacroix does finally confess the full story of what happened in Spain, he reveals a paralysis in himself that we are never entirely convinced has been cured. Is this plausible psychology? Possibly. Does it show a conflict in Miller himself, between his appetite for writing a historical yarn and something quieter, more subtle and more inward? This seems just as likely.
Andrew Miller’s eighth novel consolidates his track record as a distinguished, much-awarded novelist who specialises in historical writing. But there is nothing merely consolidatory about this book. It is a profound exploration of culpability, written in prose that comes singing off the page ... the novel is no worthy, schematic churn through a series of ethical options, but a pacy thriller. It throws out its big ideas with such lightness of touch that it’s only afterwards that the reader feels their sting. Miller writes with a unique mixture of charge and luminosity ... All the book’s perceptions are deftly given to his characters, with the double result that the observations feel peculiarly intimate, and the characters themselves come vividly to life ... Miller is no conventional 'historical novelist' but he has set all his fiction to date in an Elsewhere. To read any of his novels is to leave behind what we think we know ... this novel pulls the past close. What makes other times and places recognisable and relevant is the similarity to us of the people who inhabit them. Indeed, surely one of the most pressing ethical obligations of our own time and place is to recognise ourselves in the other. Miller’s latest novel is a compelling read and an important literary achievement, not least because it does just this.
As ever, Miller recreates the past so vividly that reading the novel is never less than a fully immersive experience. And fortunately, just as you think that he might be rather overdoing the sights, sounds and smells of 1809 Britain, there’s another twist to the chase-plot, another hair- raising flashback to the chaos of the Peninsular War, or simply another juicy traveller’s tale. Miller’s welcome re-embracing of old-school psychological realism means that virtually all the characters...are given genuine depth. It also means that (even more old-school) his depiction of Lacroix seems to owe something to the idea in Renaissance literature, including Shakespeare, that being able to tell your own story coherently is the surest sign that all is well ... as well-written books by intelligent people go...this is a particularly enjoyable and satisfying one.
Miller is never less than a pungent, atmospheric writer ... But despite the occasional line of Gaelic, and a handful of Scots words, none of the chapters or passages set in the Hebrides, or Glasgow, carries an authentic note or mood of Scottishness ... A little heavy-handed also are the nods to the early 19th century ... So from promising beginnings, Now We Shall be Completely Free comes disappointingly adrift. Even the conclusion of Calley’s murderous mission, the wire on which all events are to this point tensely strung, is oddly rushed and unsatisfying. By the story’s end, it feels less as if you have seen how war can make even a decent man heartless, and more that you’ve been given a history lesson, one that you did not necessarily need.
By alternating the narrative between Lacroix and his pursuers, Miller effectively ratchets up the tension and suspense. With a less-skilled writer, naming characters after the officers and soldiers charged in the 1968 My Lai massacre in Vietnam could have come across as a ham-fisted approach, but it’s appropriately chilling in this melancholy portrait of war, culpability, and redemption ... The author keeps his research well hidden. The dazzling, ambiguous ending will fodder plenty of book-club debate ... Miller is in fine form here, mixing an unforgettable cat-and-mouse chase with a moving love story.
