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1740s, book review, colonialism, Culloden, England, France, gender roles, George Washington, greed, historical fiction, indenture, John Sayles, Native Americans, North America, picaresque, racism, Scotland, slavery, terrific dialog, transportation
Review: Jamie MacGillivray, by John Sayles
Melville House, 2022. 696 pp. $32
Jamie MacGillivray, like many young Scotsmen in the 1740s who hate their English overlords, supports Bonnie Prince Charlie’s attempt to regain his throne—and, more than that, seize that of Britain too. It’s a desperate, romantic cause that has Jamie swept up, but he’s no fighter. Trained in law and further educated during a previous stay in Paris, he’s engaged as a courier, bringing information and sometimes money to disparate groups supporting the prince.
Unfortunately, however, Jamie’s presence near the fateful battle of Culloden in 1745, which destroys the Pretender’s forces, leads to arrest and what seems a certain rendezvous with the end of a rope. And Jenny, a young woman who briefly shields him, pays dearly for this kindness and her proximity to the battlefield. Transportation to the New World is her rumored fate.
The narrative follows the pair separately as they make their way across the ocean; it’s not much of a spoiler to tell you Jamie’s not hanged but transported. Jenny goes first to the Caribbean, whereas he winds up in Georgia, an indentured servant for life.
But in this picaresque epic of North America, each character’s life changes frequently, depending on who’s in power. Their paths differ, mostly because of gender: he’s a potential worker, hunter, maybe warrior; she’s a domestic servant and potential consort. It’s a gripping tale, with as many twists and turns as you please. Avoid reading the jacket flap, and it’ll stay that way.
The narrative is also bloody and violent, for Sayles aims to show not only slavery, colonialism, and greed, the building blocks of what would become the United States, but the rivalry between Britain and France to own North America and the Caribbean.
There’s little, if any, virtue on either side, despite much religious righteousness. And the American colonials, as they style themselves, are as bigoted and vicious as the Europeans, including a young George Washington.
The Native Americans are caught in the middle, with no chance of survival or security. This is the history they didn’t teach us in school.
As a novel, however, Jamie MacGillivray has its ups and downs. I like the thought-provoking story, which, from the get-go in Scotland, depicts the English in a poor light, not the sort of people Americans might wish to claim as ancestors. The dialog is terrific, as you would expect from the maker of such films as Matewan and Passion Fish, but be warned that the Scots dialect, though musical, takes a while to grasp.
I particularly remember Jamie trying to explain the War of the Austrian Succession to his fellow bondsmen, what in lesser hands would sound dry or, at best, a crisp information dump. Here, in his pungent speech, it’s hilarious.
The prose has both a cinematic feel and emotional resonance, as with this passage through Jenny’s eyes, as she waits in harbor aboard ship for her journey across the Atlantic:
On clear days when the tide is low she can see that the supports of the Tilbury dock are crusted with wee creatures, so fixed in place that they must glean their nourishment from the water of the Thames. What can it profit them, if they think at all, to fret each day if the tide will rise again, or that a dockie might arrive tasked to scrape them from their hold on life? Airy thoughts, thoughts of matters of which Jenny has no dominion, and can therefore neither harm nor help her.
I like the characterizations less. Jamie and Jenny are appealing, somewhat larger than life, but need more flaws. I read the story wondering how they’d cope with their circumstances, not how they’d feel about them. As the above passage suggests, Jenny is like the barnacles she observes, certain that she has no say over what happens to her, so emotions are wasted. Jamie’s passionate and stubborn, but he has little or no choice in his actions, so those qualities mostly lie beneath the surface. In both cases, their inner selves have no bearing on their lives—it’s who they look or sound like, and who their allies are, that decide their fate.
Is this the theme of Jamie MacGillivray, that the vaunted American individualism in fact doesn’t exist? Perhaps; but it’s hard to tell, because the only people in this novel who have a say in anything are those in power.
If you can embrace the epic story as what you’ll get, then you may like this novel. And as a bonus, Sayles throws in several cameos of the famous and influential, generally at the point in their lives before they got that way. Washington is one; the novelist and pamphleteer Henry Fielding is another. When you come across them, you think, “Oh, so that’s what he was doing before history heard of him.”
A small pleasure, but part of the ride.
Disclaimer: I obtained my reading copy of this book from the public library.