Jamie MacGillivray

October 31, 2022
Film director and novelist Sayles (Yellow Earth) follows in this strong outing the parallel stories of a Scottish rebel and a young Scottish woman pressed into servitude and sent to the Caribbean. The author opens with the 1745 Battle of Culloden. On one side, there’s “pretender” Bonnie Prince Charlie and his motley army of Highlanders, Irish, Scots, and English deserters. They face off with the infamous Duke of Cumberland and his government forces. Jamie MacGillivray of Dunmaglas—rebel to the core—is captured by the redcoats, imprisoned in a squalid London jail, and transported to Maryland to clear land for his master under the gaze of a man enslaved from Africa. Meanwhile, Jenny Ferguson winds up in the Caribbean after she was falsely accused of helping the rebels, where she’s forced to work as a cook. She eventually learns French and makes her way to Quebec, where Sayles sets more exciting battle scenes. Though Sayles’s efforts at phonetic Scottish diction sometimes sound a bit hackneyed, he has a knack for bringing his many characters to life, and he makes palpable the raw violence of war and the uncompromising inequality of the period. It’s a worthy epic.

January 1, 2023
Acclaimed screenwriter, director, and novelist Sayles (Yellow Earth, 2020) blends his wide-ranging narrative skills to great effect in this sprawling historical epic. We meet Jamie MacGillivray at the ill-fated 1746 Battle of Culloden, the Jacobite rebellion of Bonnie Prince Charlie Stuart that was summarily quashed by the crown and at which our hero is left for dead. Jamie is sent to prison, escapes the hangman, and is subsequently sentenced to indentured servitude in America. This broad canvas plays to Sayles' considerable strengths, alternating between a wide cinematic lens and the more intimate portraiture of the charismatic MacGillivray. The dialogue is presented in a thick Scottish brogue that takes some getting used to and benefits from being read aloud and, ultimately, proves to be an ideal vehicle for the pithy banter and caustic wit of the rebel class. Jamie's story line runs parallel to that of Jenny Ferguson, a Dickensian figure similarly sent to colonial America and equally adept at staying on this side of the grave. Sayles' grand vision yields a rollicking yarn that will satisfy the discerning historical adventure reader.

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A Scotsman on the wrong side of history is thrust into the New World. The title hero of this baggy epic by filmmaker/novelist Sayles is a Jacobite on a futile quest to unseat King George II. After his cohort's bloody defeat at the Battle of Culloden in 1746, he's captured by British soldiers, imprisoned, then shipped across the Atlantic and pressed into indentured servitude in Maryland. Meanwhile, Jenny, a farm girl with whom Jamie had a chance encounter during the battle, is similarly taken captive by a French regiment and sent to the island of Martinique. Sayles braids Jamie's and Jenny's storylines across more than a decade, culminating in their involvement in the French and Indian War. Along the way, Sayles is expert at describing the tactical elements of the battles (George Washington, then a Virginia regiment commander, plays a minor but key role) and deftly captures the dialects of his characters and the violence they're subjected to. But Sayles' chief interest is in how time, place, war, and imperialism at once do violence on bodies and identities. Jamie becomes embedded with the Lenape tribe seeking independence from colonizers, earning the name Long Knife; Jenny, for her part, becomes an eyewitness to the slave trade and seeks her own form of independence. Jamie, denied a sense of home on two continents, exemplifies the discontent that sparked the American Revolution, and Sayles underscores the Native Americans' disenfranchisement as well. ("If we are not to live on this land...why would we die for it?" one tribal leader says.) Sayles' style is immersive to a fault, often dragging readers into details of war tactics and walk-on characters, muffling the strength of the story's two leads. But Sayles makes clear the kind of bigotry and greed they're fighting against. An admirably ambitious if overly upholstered historical yarn.

COPYRIGHT(2023) Kirkus Reviews, ALL RIGHTS RESERVED. (Online Review)