Jamie MacGillivray: The Renegades’ Journey (2022)
By John Sayles
Melville House, 696 pages.
★★★
If you have seen a John Sayles film, you know that he's a riveting storyteller. He's not as strong as a novelist, but he certainly brings raconteur sensibilities to the page. His
latest literary protagonist is Scottish. Jamie MacGillivray is a sprawling novel that begins in 1754, during Scotland’s disastrous Battle of Culloden.
The buildup to Culloden is complicated. In brief, England had become a Protestant nation under King VIII. In 1603, King James Stuart VI of Scotland became King James I of England and merged the two countries. Alas, future Stuart monarchs were inept, one was executed, and the openly Catholic James II was deposed in 1688. Many Catholic Highland Scots found a champion in “Bonnie Prince” Charles Stuart. His return from France in 1745 rallied them, but the dreams of a Stuart restoration died at Culloden where his forces were routed by English and pro-English Scottish troops led by the Duke of Cumberland.
Many history books move on at that point, but for Jamie MacGillivray, the combatants that survived, and those who got in the way, the page turned to new tragedies. English subjugation of Scotland was brutal. Untold numbers of Scots were thrown into filthy prisons to await “trials,” though guilt was often predetermined and the only question was: execution or deportation? Even that was sometimes settled by lottery.
Jamie was educated in the law in France, spoke several languages, and didn't actually bear arms but he was an unrepentant patriot, which was enough to warrant hanging. I won't say how he avoided it, but he is exiled. That was also the fate of Jenny Ferguson, a lovely lass seized after Culloden for the crime of being poor and suspicious. She was clamped in chains and thrown into a creaky ship whose voyage was marked by sickness and deprivation. Before Sayles’ long novel concludes, readers will visit numerous overseas colonies. Sayles has long been a champion of the underdog, thus Jamie and Jenny are strong personalities. Both, however, undergo adapt-or-perish challenges, which isn’t the same thing as triumphing.
The story of North American colonies is just as complicated as deciphering the Battle of Culloden. Scotland's “Auld Alliance” with France was played out in North America among the French, the English, exiles like Jamie, Indians, German immigrants, and African slaves. The novel bounces from Scotland and the Caribbean to Maryland, Virginia, Pennsylvania, the contested Ohio Valley, and Lower Canada (now Quebec). Jamie’s deepening anti-English zealotry will eventually carry him to Quebec City’s Plains of Abraham. There, in 1759, General Wolfe’s troops subdued those of General Montcalm, thereby placing French Canada fell under English control. (It was an episode in what got labeled the French and Indian War.)
Believe me when I say this is a mere skeletal outline of Jamie MacGillivray. In many ways Jenny’s tale is even more remarkable, a series of unexpected rises and setbacks depending on the fate of her paramours of the moment. “Moment” is the right word at a time in which fortune and life were contingent upon forces beyond the control of those caught up in them.
There was much to like about Jamie MacGillivray. Sayles did his homework and makes history come alive in small details that seldom appear elsewhere. If his were a nonfiction book, we’d call it history from the bottom up. As a novel, though, Sayles populates it with all manner of colorful characters. The Scots run the gamut from pious to ribald, and from from plebeian poets to savage warriors. Even the warriors pale in comparison to Lenape leader Shingas the Terrible, a real person.
This is not the literary equivalent of an action movie. Sayles’ characters often speak in dialect and slip into and out of English, Gaelic, French, and native languages. Sayles gives enough clues to get the gist of the dialog, but he seldom translates. I don't think he's showing off, but I do believe he got so immersed that he often demands too much from readers. Overall, Jamie MacGillivray could have benefitted from a stern developmental editor to impose clarity and concision.
That said, Jamie McGillivrary is worth wading through. Who wants a just-the-facts past? Without its detail and “story,” history is just a list. Like Jamie, I'd rather howl than yawn.
Rob Weir
Note: I bought this book when Sayles did a reading in South Hadley. Ask your local library to order it.
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