NOW WE SHALL BE ENTIRELY FREE
By Andrew Miller
Paperback: 432 pages
Publisher: Europa Editions (September 10, 2019)
ISBN-13: 978-1609455439
Reviewed by Charles McGrath
"Miller’s new novel, “Now We Shall Be Entirely Free,” seems bent on defying convention and expectations, and deploys the Mantel magic only intermittently. Like most of his books, it’s set in the past — in the early 19th century, in this case, when John Lacroix, a British Army officer and veteran of the Peninsular War between England and France, is deposited, half-dead, at his estate in Somerset. But what begins as if it might be a full-immersion historical novel (in the manner, say, of Bernard Cornwell’s Sharpe series, also set during that war) quickly becomes instead a psychological mystery. Lacroix, once he recovers, proves to be half-deaf and broken in spirit, suffering from what we would now call PTSD. Instead of rejoining his regiment, he decides, for reasons that are as unclear to him as they are to the reader, to travel to the Scottish islands, where he has never been...."