The novel's reversals of fortune, though, and its points of fracture - white and black, Scotland and Jamaica - are shocking worlds apart absolutely comparable to the then-and-now split of the first novel. Its timescale covers 60 years or so between the massacre of the Jacobites at Culloden in 1746, through Scottish imperialism in Jamaica, and into the more fashionable "feeling" of the Scottish Enlightenment the rollicking, distastefully witty Edinburgh of Johnson and Boswell, a place "loud not with the march of a Highland army and the din of bagpipes, but with ideas". On the surface, Joseph Knight seems less formally ambitious than The Fanatic. As Robertson says in his acknowledgments, he has "taken many liberties" to write this novel, "invented entire episodes and characters". John Wedderburn of Ballindean") to win his right to freedom. In 1778, Joseph Knight was the first black man in a Scottish civil court case ("Joseph Knight, a Negro of Africa v. His second novel, Joseph Knight, is a fiction with its taproot crucially in truth - and, conversely, a truth made seminal again, 200 years on, by fiction. His belief in the power of books to alter things glows at the centre of what he writes. Robertson is a moralist whose deftness of touch and gift for narrative clarity disguises the sheer heft of his sermon.
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