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A review by cattytrona
The Fanatic by James Robertson
3.0
the idea of labour winning a general election feeling like a powerful enough sea change that it can serve as the climax for a unrelated whole book is so nuts. wish politics was more than just a slow slouch towards apathy!
anyway, this was fine. i’m disappointed, but that’s largely an issue of misplaced expectations: i thought this would be a book about working in tourism/tours in edinburgh. that was in there but it felt brief and the arc of it fell a little flat, the characters never coming into relief enough to make their changing impactful. meanwhile, the slight majority of the novel was historic. it’s told in an out of order way, where you know what it’s building to long before you get there, which on the one hand is all very predestined, past-viewed-from-the-present, but on the other hand it can feel superfluous to spend all that time in the 17th century going over events we’ve been told happened. at the same time, it never felt fully established either. things happen, the reader’s told, and so you wait for an explanation of why, but instead you're shown that thing happening, and it becomes justification for itself, without ever really justifying anything.
robertson has a vaguely familiar biography (english phd on scottish literature clubbb), and i can tell he and i have read much of the same thought: occasional moments of historiographic character opinion bubble up didactically. it’s not very carefully done. but it’s nice to see it thought through in fiction, in a more practical, placed way than a thesis. still, i can tell our paths diverge: he clearly has a genuine interest in history as a discipline, and i do not, and am much more interested in a cultural perspective on how that stuff arrives in the present. my version of this book would be all ghost tour, with mitchel weir and co only appearing in excerpt. it’s not that, obviously. if it was, though, it would probably be useful for my thesis.
i think my favourite sections of this book were just folk walking around edinburgh. it’s evoked well, the geography is really clear and familiar and fun to see on the page. i liked this section:
anyway, this was fine. i’m disappointed, but that’s largely an issue of misplaced expectations: i thought this would be a book about working in tourism/tours in edinburgh. that was in there but it felt brief and the arc of it fell a little flat, the characters never coming into relief enough to make their changing impactful. meanwhile, the slight majority of the novel was historic. it’s told in an out of order way, where you know what it’s building to long before you get there, which on the one hand is all very predestined, past-viewed-from-the-present, but on the other hand it can feel superfluous to spend all that time in the 17th century going over events we’ve been told happened. at the same time, it never felt fully established either. things happen, the reader’s told, and so you wait for an explanation of why, but instead you're shown that thing happening, and it becomes justification for itself, without ever really justifying anything.
robertson has a vaguely familiar biography (english phd on scottish literature clubbb), and i can tell he and i have read much of the same thought: occasional moments of historiographic character opinion bubble up didactically. it’s not very carefully done. but it’s nice to see it thought through in fiction, in a more practical, placed way than a thesis. still, i can tell our paths diverge: he clearly has a genuine interest in history as a discipline, and i do not, and am much more interested in a cultural perspective on how that stuff arrives in the present. my version of this book would be all ghost tour, with mitchel weir and co only appearing in excerpt. it’s not that, obviously. if it was, though, it would probably be useful for my thesis.
i think my favourite sections of this book were just folk walking around edinburgh. it’s evoked well, the geography is really clear and familiar and fun to see on the page. i liked this section:
There was a grey polis box, like the Tardis in Doctor Who, all closed up and padlocked. The polis didn't use the boxes any more. You used to see bobbies brewing tea and reading the paper in them but not these days. Funny how you always thought polis boxes were like the Tardis. There must have been a time when people thought the Tardis was like a polis box. […] In other parts of the city someone was buying up the polis boxes and turning them into wee coffee kiosks. One day fathers would point them out to their weans and say, 'See aw thae coffee kiosks, years ago they used tae be Tardises.