The books I love and have loved in the past I have chosen almost always by the recommendations of others.The last book I loved, I loved with an added fever and thrill of having discovered it on my own.
The Testament of Gideon Mack is haunting. It is the last book I loved. I love it with an aching possessiveness.
It is a quiet sort of book; intimate and honest though no less enthralling despite the ease of its delivery as a purported memoir from Scottish kirk minister, closet atheist, and friend of the devil reverend Gideon Mack.
A novel written as a memoir under editorial scrutiny, its editor tells us in the preface that he is charged with deciphering the late Gideon Mack’s memoirs, which were retrieved after Mack’s body was found on a Scottish hillside. Gideon Mack, born into the dogmatic universe of an emotionally barren father and a numb useless mother enters into the clergy after years of confirmed but closeted faithlessness. Cunning and exact, he is an excellent religious counselor dedicated to his own furtive fatalism until he falls into a ravine and washes up on the shore of a cave that belongs to a well-dressed man of a pleasant disposition who claims to be the Devil.
The devil is, as he is often depicted in books where men meet him, charming and hospitable. But more so than any other tale of Satan and man, he is human – or at least humanized: plain, tired, struggling for intimacy. Their meeting is a beautiful and twisted communion; a subversive miracle of renewed faith in the divine. They converse, they eat, they spoon like exhausted lovers, they sweat and sleep, they seem to heal a little. And after three days and three nights Mack returns to the highlands a mad prophet, and as with most mad prophets, he’s vilified and alienated.
I try to tell people how I love this book, why I adore it. It is difficult to explain. It is not like other “men talk with the devil” stories. I don’t think it’s about Man and the Devil. I don’t think it’s an allegory for humanity’s demonic nature. I love this book because, I think, it is tale of unrequited love. It is about a lonely man who, for a small period of time, is intimate and strangely hopeful. He is finally connected, and then it is gone.
It’s not a new story. It’s been told many times. But never so deftly, I promise you. It convinced me of the beauty of austerity. Novelist James Robertson writes like stained glass looks: severe, entrancing. There are moments of unnerving subtlety and boldness, too. Robertson is exacting in his depiction of Mack’s reverence for things otherworldly, and Mack is sadly aware of his own condition. I love this book because I felt bereft. I connected, and then it was gone.
