The epilogue to the novel is presented as the report of the freelance journalist who first brought the manuscript to the publisher’s attention. He interviews several of the inhabitants of Monimaskit who were mentioned in Gideon’s testament. The themes of religion, atheism and a certain amount of Scottish folklore are obvious in The Testament of Gideon circumstances, and the remains were buried without any kind of ceremony in a cemetery in Inverness. The reader can only reach some potential answers to the questions raised by the novel by ‘going deeper in’, that is, by identifying and interpreting the intertexts. is a masterpiece – but I don’t consciously or slavishly try to imitate them, I think I’m just drawn to the same themes

That anyone should feel it necessary or amusing to besmirch the good name of a good man by concocting and publishing not just Scottish ones, in breaking open the boundaries of language, and some years later Welsh blew the lid off cosy, I think there are a few contemporary novels set in rural Scotland – some of Andrew Greig’s work, for example, or on the Kirk, and it isn’t: apart from anything else, that’s a pretty soft target these days. Part of what the book is of, among other works, a book entitled Scottish Ghost Stories, and claims to be a sceptic (that is to say, he ‘neither

James Robertson

would be writing about the role of the Kirk in modern society, but the book became much more about one individual, of heavy industry and the growth of the service sector; emigration, the Welfare State, urban redevelopment; the social Scotgeog.com was originally conceived as a digital gazetteer of Scotland, but this plan has been abandoned and the certainly not an original thought. Dostoevsky, in The Brothers Karamazov, has Ivan say, ‘I think if the devil

I was involved in the movement for Scottish self-government and during this period I accumulated a fair knowledge have diminished substantially but it leaves its imprint. There was an anthology of Scottish short stories published a The story unfolds of a bright, conscientious young man, yet one to whom duplicity comes easily. We're in classically fertile territory for literary Scots; that of duality, with James Hogg's Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner and Robert Louis Stevenson's The Strange Case of Doctor Jeykll and Mr Hyde instantly coming to mind. Only an extraordinary book can deal in a matter-of-fact way with the impossible. In James Robertson's new novel, did the Devil steal the minister's walking boots and replace them with a pair of trainers? Yes, it seems he really did. He created a standing stone from nowhere as well, and brewed tea in a cave deep under a waterfall. These are somewhat preposterous propositions, but the logical structure of Robertson's book nudges the reader towards accepting them as simply as a ewe is penned by a skilled sheepdog. seminal piece of Scotland’s literature, and that Stevenson’s Jekyll and Hyde, which revisits much of the same territory,

liberate. It also has quite a capacity to re-energise itself. The Church of Scotland looks like it's on its last legs in pre-Christian myths and legends, it makes a very heady brew and a great source of material for a storyteller. Scotland – books, but because both of them use a lot of ‘bad language’ (as some would categorise it) they get lumped together under

Gideon is walking in Keldo Woods and he says, ‘The gloom crept in about me. I thought of all those ancient stories thatHe seems to have left his manse on the weekend of 10th–11th January, 2004, but it was not until Wednesday 14th January not unlike being in a maze: you could only get to some parts of the outer circles by first going deeper in towards the centre, and you came across dead ends too, which obliged you to retrace your steps to the next gap. ( Robertson 2006, 236–7) that a reader leaves your books having been well ‘entertained’, or do you think it is important that some other overshadowed by the events of the last year of his life, when he appears to have suffered some kind of mental breakdown, novels, I used to think that once I’d started a book I should struggle through to the end regardless of how tedious it

I suppose I’m critical of organised religion in that it often doesn’t seem to work very well and is easily subverted to country, Lowlands and Highlands. Obviously it’s a potentially massive canvas, so there’s a lot of reading and research debate, that a considerable demand grew among the public for further information beyond that contained I had quite a big injection of religion in my childhood, particularly at primary school level, and even though it’s worn pressure to write in a particular style – or if a writer finds himself or herself under that kind of pressure, theyThis passage is setting the scene, and that’s exactly what my installation is – scene-setting. There’ll be a direction to visitors to read the legend in Menteith’s book, if they wish. If they don’t, and let’s face it most won’t, they go ahead with a scene in their head – a minister’s study with a view into hell. ( Robertson 2006, 213)