Conviction that the truth has yet to come out

[What follows is a review of James Robertson’s novel The Professor of Truth published yesterday on the 1streading’s Blog:]

James Robertson also features on the 50 best Scottish books of the last 50 years list. Surprisingly, it is his 2003 novel Joseph Knight rather than his playful evocation of James Hogg, the more celebrated Testament of Gideon Mack. If that is Robertson’s stand out novel, however, it is only because he engages so nakedly with Scottish literature rather than Scottish history. Robertson is always an ambitious writer, no more so than in his previous novel,As the Land Lay Still, an attempt to describe Scotland’s twentieth century in fiction. Robertson’ latest, The Professor of Truth, while depicted on a smaller canvas, is just as urgently concerned with Scotland’s past.

Taking the Lockerbie bombing in 1988 as his starting point, he has created a fictional version of events from the conviction that the truth has yet to come out.

His central character is a university lecturer, Alan Tealing, who lost both his wife and daughter in the bombing. Twenty one years later, Tealing has not been able to let go, despite pleas from his own family and that of his dead wife. The novel begins with the death of Khalil Khazar –the fictional version of al Megrahi – but Tealing is certain Khazar was innocent:

“Everything is still as it was, we are no closer to finding out the truth about who really killed all those people twenty-one years ago, who killed my wife and daughter.”

Where the novel departs from reality is in the appearance of a shady American character, Nilsen, who arrives at Tealing’s door. Nilsen worked at the crash site creating the “narrative” of what happened. In a novel that is about facing death, Nilsen is dying of cancer and has come to tell Tealing (some of) what he knows. In particular, he gives him information on the whereabouts of the witness, Parroulet, that placed Khazar at the airport where it is claimed the bomb was loaded (“ingested”) onto the plane. Tealing has always believed that this witness was pressured to identify Khazar thus preventing any further investigation.

If this makes it all sound a little le Carré, Robertson also uses Nilsen’s visit to tell us about Tealing’s life. This is where, as a novelist, he can give the story a dimension that another book about Lockerbie couldn’t. One small but telling moment is when Tealing sees a father and daughter playing a game looking at the pictures in a newspaper on the bus. Not only does it bring home to him his own lost relationship but the girl’s innocence in the face of world disasters. (Her comment on an article about floods is, “Why are they swimming?”)

This first section of the novel takes place in snow and ice, presumably reflecting the way in which Tealing’s life, and also to some extent his emotions, have become frozen. In the second section the action moves to Australia as Tealing goes in search of Parroulet. Obviously to say much about this would rather spoil the thrilleresque elements of the novel, but Robertson’s decision to set this during a season of fierce bushfires is a stroke of genius. Not only does it balance the symbolism, expressing both the potential of cleansing or destruction, but it emphasises the wider themes of facing up to both death and life.

In his comments on his choice of Joseph Knight, Stuart Kelly talks about how the past in Robertson’s novels is “urgent, pressing and angry.” That is certainly true of The Professor of Truth. The novel’s success, however, lies in it not only working as a political expose, but as a moving character study of loss.

Lockerbie is an existential nightmare

[My attention has just been drawn to a review by Mike Wade in The Times (behind the paywall) of James Robertson’s The Professor of Truth.  It reads in part:]

On December 21, 1988, a bomb aboard a flight from London to New York exploded 31,000ft above southern Scotland. All 259 passengers and crew were killed, and when the wreckage of Pan Am 103 hit the ground, 11 others perished in the village of Lockerbie. More died that evening than in any other terrorist attack in Britain.

For the bereaved, a long, dark journey had begun. They had to wait years for the lineaments of an inquiry to take shape and for suspects to be identified. When, in 2000, two Libyans came to trial at Camp Zeist in the Netherlands, one walked free. The other, Abdul Baset Ali al-Megrahi, was identified by Tony Gauci, a Maltese shopkeeper, found guilty and sentenced to life imprisonment.

With al-Megrahi’s conviction, many of the bereaved found closure. Jim Swire, whose daughter Flora had been killed, did not. Already well known as a spokesman for the relatives of the dead, he believed the convicted man had been framed, and embarked on a mission to exonerate him, and reveal, he hoped, the truth behind Flora’s murder. This much is fact, but in James Robertson’s latest fiction,The Professor of Truth, only some of the details and none of the names are precise. Lockerbie is never identified. Megrahi is renamed Khalil Khazar; Gauci becomes Martin Parroulet, a taxi driver; and Swire, a Worcestershire GP, is transformed into Alan Tealing, the academic referred to in the title of the book.

In his disclaimer, Robertson insists that these characters are “products of the imagination”, though of course Swire would be most unlikely to sue even if they weren’t. The novel sets out to undermine the verdict of the real trial and is profoundly humane in its examination of Tealing’s remorseless obsession with “the case”. By the end, it is pity we feel for him, not admiration.

Robertson is a great storyteller. His earlier works won comparisons with Walter Scott and James Hogg; And The Land Lay Still, a sprawling Scottish nationalist epic, paradoxically evoked the work of J B Priestley. This time around there are shades of Graham Greene in the eerie sense of menace that surrounds his central character. It is a tense and gripping read.

Set in the present, the narrative takes place over little more than a week. It opens in winter, when, out of nowhere, Nilsen, a CIA agent, appears at Tealing’s home. The American is terminally ill, but before he dies he hopes to provide a piece of information to help the Englishman find peace. Tealing at first resents his visitor, but when circumstances force him to act on this new lead, he sets off in pursuit of Parroulet, the crucial witness.

Tealing’s back story is revealed in contemplation and reminiscence. He recalls the week spent around the village in the immediate aftermath of the catastrophe, imagining the fate of his wife and daughter, plummeting through the night. “They would have fallen with everything else, suitcases, handbags, blankets, the paraphernalia of air travel, a precipitation of human lives and possessions. That terrible downpour filled my head. Day and night, it never ceased.”

When at last he manages to break a police cordon around the disaster area, he rescues a plastic peg from the heather, the kind of rotating clip that secures a passenger’s table. It stays on his desk at home for the rest of his life, a memento of his family’s last moments.

These details are beautifully imagined. Others are all too real: Parroulet’s inconsistent evidence, the pressure brought to bear on him by the police and, finally, the reward he takes for helping to jail a terrorist, are all traced from Gauci’s life. In the real world of the bombing, it was confirmed in 2007 that a reward of $2 million (£1.3 million) had been promised to the shopkeeper for his testimony at Camp Zeist. The revelation was one of the six grounds cited by the Scottish Criminal Cases Review Commission for granting al-Megrahi leave to appeal.

The case was never heard. Within a year the Libyan had cancer diagnosed. His lawyers claim that he agreed to drop his appeal in return for his release on compassionate grounds; he later died in Tripoli. Meanwhile, Gauci, like Parroulet in the novel, has gone to ground with his money, in Australia. Swire maintains a website, www.lockerbietruth.com, to keep the case in the public eye.

Robertson’s fiction shows that, in fact, Lockerbie is an existential nightmare for the people it left behind. The horror is summed up by the cynical CIA agent, who has the measure of Tealing’s restless 25-year quest, asking: “Were you even alive before the bomb went off?”

The Professor of Truth by James Robertson; Hamish Hamilton, 257pp, £16.99; e-book £10.

A permanent stain on Scottish justice

[At the Edinburgh International Book Festival today James Robertson featured at an event entitled What kind of Scotland do we imagine? The following are excerpts from a review on the Literature for Lads website:]

James Robertson was introduced by the Chair of the event and fellow author, Allan Massie as "a distinguished and versatile novelist having written about topics such as slavery, Calvinism and Scottish history… In addition in his latest novel The Professor of Truth he examines the question of truth and what is justice." Over the next hour Robertson gave his views on many of these topics whilst also engaging in interesting debate with both the Chair and members of the audience. 

Robertson opened proceedings by reading a section from The Professor of Truth which featured a discussion between two of the characters and their views on the justice system.  Following this Robertson shared with the audience his belief that the justice system is in many regards flawed.  He believes that in the past '...the truth is not always achieved. Justice has not always been done. This has implications for all of us as Law is fundamental to any society. If it's not working it is a problem for all of us'. Although both Allan Massie and Robertson were keen to point out that The Professor of Truth is a work of fiction it is clearly based on the Lockerbie bombing and the subsequent legal case.

Chair Massie questioned Robertson about the pending appeal in the case of the Lockerbie bomber. "If it's rejected what does it say about Scottish Law?" Robertson believes "there will be a great deal of unfinished business if the outcome is not challenged. Currently it's a permanent stain on Scottish justice. The system has a shadow hanging over it… it's crucial to lay to rest many of the severe doubts people have." (...)

Robertson is an outstanding novelist and respected cultural voice in the world of Scottish politics. Today he shared his views with an interested and animated audience who were keen to engage him in debate and discussion both on his novels and on the impending Scottish referendum. There is no doubt that whatever the outcome of next month's referendum he will continue to remain one of Scotland's leading novelists and cultural commentators.

James Robertson and Jim Swire interviewed

[The following is adapted from an item on the Lockerbie Truth website:]

During the 2013 Hay Festival, Philippe Sands, Professor of Law and Director of the Centre on International Courts and Tribunals at University College London,

Philippe Sands

 

James Robertson

interviewed Jim Swire and James Robertson at an event to mark the launch of James Robertson's new novel The Professor of Truth.

Jim Swire explains and recounts his twenty five year search for the truth about who brutally murdered his daughter Flora, its effects upon him and on his family.

In a detailed and hard-hitting presentation he challenges the Scottish and Westminster authorities to re-examine their position on a matter of historic 

international significance.

A podcast of the interview can be heard here.

Truth versus justice, cynicism versus hope

[What follows is a review by Hannah McGill of James Robertson’s novel The Professor of Truth in yesterday’s edition of Scotland on Sunday:]

Should novelists and other makers of fictions be discouraged from drawing their inspiration from life? Some argue that novels and films drawn from real events muddy the ­factual waters, pollute collective memory with inaccuracies or even just display poor taste.

Clearly, to bar the practice would be impossible: most writers are drawing from something real most of the time, whether they’re up front about it or not. But objections can be more vociferous when the aspect of real life chosen is a controversial one. Say, one of the biggest crimes the UK has ever seen. Or one of the most significant miscarriages of justice.

James Robertson’s new novel doesn’t name as its subject the explosion of Pan Am Flight 103 over Lockerbie in 1988, or the ensuing legal case against Abdelbaset al-Megrahi, but the parallels are not so much clear as glaring. Robertson, indeed, is hardly ducking them: while his publishers are urging comparison with the thrillers of Graham Greene and John le Carré, he’s sharing promotional events with activists for a reopening of the Lockerbie case.

That’s not necessarily a contradiction. On one level, this is a fictional study of how ordinary people cope with embroilment in crimes and cover-ups perpetrated by states; on another, it’s a piece of campaigning literature, intended to publicise the overt problems with a case which the cross-party bulk of the British political establishment would dearly love to see closed for good. These functions aren’t mutually exclusive. But since some potential readers of a new novel by the author of The Testament of Gideon Mack and And the Land Lay Still may be put off by the prospect of being campaigned at, let’s deal with the first one first.

The Professor Of Truth is not a treatise in novel’s clothing, but a novel, and a very good one at that: at once powered by action and mystery, and profoundly invested in the emotional lives of its characters. The titular professor, an English literature academic named Alan Tealing, is a lovingly drawn and wholly believable creation: widely read, but secretly fearful of intellectual adequacy; private, but forced into a public role by the unsought drama of having lost his wife and daughter in the most high-profile manner imaginable. A slightly dull man who has been briefly transformed by his experience of love and fatherhood, Tealing is now an amateur sleuth, preoccupied day and night by “The Case” even two decades after its main event. His project is not just to bypass official obfuscation and find those really responsible for his loss: it is to replace the energy of his marriage, to keep alive a passion for something, to secure for himself a point to it all.

This is all wonderfully and sensitively evoked, as are Tealing’s encounters along the way with truth-seekers, secret-keepers and minor players alike. Robertson offers up some powerful philosophical asides on truth versus justice, cynicism versus hope, and the nature of romantic love; he also shows his mettle as an ­effortless evoker of atmospheres, particularly when Tealing’s quest takes him to Australia, and drunkenness, food poisoning, broiling heat and cultural alienation all mingle potently with his jet lag.

The plot can shift on in a slightly jerky manner, but that’s not too unusual within the political thriller genre, and Robertson’s way with character eases the transitions.

What, then, about the book’s relationship to the Lockerbie disaster itself? Well, it made me want to know more. I would guess that conversations took place between Robertson and his publishers about whether to include any material on the real case; and that the decision not to do so was down to a quite reasonable desire to give Robertson’s work a life as fiction.

However, I’d posit that since the proximity of “The Case” to its real-life counterpart is too extreme to be missed or disregarded – and since the author seems to wish for quite the ­reverse effect – it would have been useful to the reader to have included some information, even if it was just direction to authoritative factual sources.

Such an addition would both service the curiosity inevitably stimulated by Robertson’s ­story, and help to emphasise where his book diverges from the real events, in either their official or unofficial versions. For the record, I read a useful précis by Gareth Peirce in the London Review of Books (available online) of the issues raised by campaigners against Al-Megrahi’s conviction, and plentiful further information at Dr Jim Swire’s lockerbie­truth.com and Robert Black QC’s lockerbiecase.blogspot.com. (As for a credible defence of the official version – well, good luck sourcing one; many of the bereaved don’t feel that they have yet. This isn’t so much a case of unstable conspiracy theories, as one in which the theories stand strong while the official ­version falls apart if you breathe on it.) 

So should novelists keep their inky hands off real-life tragedies? One answer is that the word “should” has no business intruding on art. Another is that on this evidence, absolutely not: the mingling can produce work that’s both beautiful and important.

Preview of James Robertson Lockerbie novel at Boswell Book Festival

[The following is taken from the programme of the Boswell Book Festival 2013:]

A new book by James Robertson is a major literary event. Described by Irvine Welsh as “One of Britain’s best contemporary novelists” his latest novel, based on the Lockerbie bombing, a tragedy that has scarred the south west – is due out in June, so his presence at the festival gives us an exclusive preview of this new work which is already proving controversial.

With parallels to the real story, The Professor of Truth is the account of one man’s search for the truth about the bombing in which his wife and daughter were killed. When new information arrives from an unexpected source, he pursues this lead wherever it takes him, in hope not only of justice, but also escape from his enduring grief. Fiction is a departure for the Festival, but Robertson has always used the facts of contemporary and historical life in Scotland to inform his widely acclaimed novels, prompting Ian Rankin to write: ‘Robertson’s sweeping history of life and politics in twentieth century Scotland should not be ignored’.

WHERE AND WHEN

• Boswell Marquee
• Sunday, 19 May 2013
• 5.00pm
• £8, £6 (c)
  
  [Further posts on this blog referring to James Robertson and Lockerbie can be accessed here.]

James Robertson's "Lockerbie novel" published in USA

James Robertson’s novel The Professor of Truth, published in the UK in June, is today published in the United States of America.  Publishers Weekly, which has selected it as one of its best new books of the week, also contains a review which reads as follows:

Big life-and-death questions lie at the center of Robertson’s contemplative new novel, but its premise is as commercial as that of a bestselling thriller, amped up by real-life roots. Still haunted by the deaths of his wife and daughter in the bombing of Pan Am Flight 103 over Scotland more than 20 years ago [RB: the aircraft in the novel is not Pan Am 103], British literature professor Alan Tealing gets a surprise visit from a man named Ted Nilsen, who asks him provocative questions. After some verbal fencing, Nilsen explains that he’s a retired American intelligence officer with information that Tealing, who has made a second career of gathering information about the crash, will want to know. Like many others, Tealing believes that Khalil Khazar, the man convicted of the bombing, was not responsible. When Nilsen challenges him to deepen his investigation, the professor, conveniently on sabbatical at the time, accepts. The Scottish tragedy provides the framework for a deeper philosophical treatment of justice and loss and grief, all well served by Robertson’s measured, literary prose. Robertson (The Testament of Gideon Mack) makes a case for the messy complexity of truth.

James Robertson (and Jim Swire) at London Lit Festival 13

A reminder that on 1 June at 1pm James Robertson will be appearing (along with Dr Jim Swire and Alan Little) at the Southbank Centre as part of the London Lit Festival 13.  Details here.

A new five-star review of James Robertson's The Professor of Truth can be read here.

Truth and Lies in Real and Imagined Scotland

Novelist (and Justice for Megrahi stalwart) James Robertson will be speaking on 22 May during The University of Edinburgh’s Spy Week 2015. His contribution is advertised as follows:]

Truth and Lies in Real and Imagined Scotland

Date and time:  May 22 at 5.30pm

Venue:  Informatics Forum

From Shakespeare’s Macbeth to the fiction of Robert Louis Stevenson and John Buchan, literature of or about Scotland has often focused on hidden agendas, double-lives and the deceits of power and authority. James Robertson looks at some aspects of this tradition, and draws examples from his own work, including The Fanatic, And the Land Lay Still and his most recent, Lockerbie Bombing-inspired novel The Professor of Truth.

This event is free and open to all, if you would like to attend please book a place as seats will be limited:

Book a seat for Truth and Lies in Real and Imagined Scotland

James Robertson is one of Scotland’s leading novelists.  His novels are explorations of darker aspects of Scottish character, and political and social history: The Fanatic came out in 2000, and Joseph Knight in 2003, the winner of both the Saltire Scottish Book of the Year Award and the Scottish Arts Council Book of the Year Award. The Testament of Gideon Mack appeared in 2006, and And the Land Lay Still in 2010, another winner of the Saltire Scottish Book of the Year Award.  His most recent novel is The Professor of Truth.

‘One of Britain’s best contemporary novelists’, Irvine Welsh, The Guardian

Forthcoming Lockerbie novel by James Robertson

[What follows is taken from 50 books we’re looking forward to in 2013 posted yesterday on the Bookmunch website:]

The Professor of Truth by James Robertson
His novel The Testament of Gideon Mack was longlisted for the 2006 Man Booker Prize, picked by Richard and Judy’s Book Club, and shortlisted for the Saltire Book of the Year award, and his most recent And the Land Lay Still was the winner of the Saltire Book of the Year Award 2010. So The Professor of Truth which concerns a university professor Alan Tealing’s search to get to the bottom of the Lockerbie bombing that killed his wife and daughter should be something to really get our teeth into…

[James Robertson is, in my view, Scotland’s most distinguished living novelist. He is a veteran supporter of Justice for Megrahi’s campaign for an independent inquiry into the Lockerbie investigation and the prosecution and conviction of Abdelbaset Megrahi. His 2011 Saltire Society Lecture The Lockerbie affair and Scottish society can be read here.]

Profoundly and wilfully mistaken

Following Magnus Linklater’s most recent Lockerbie article in The Times, James Robertson (in my view Scotland’s most distinguished living novelist, and a Justice for Megrahi stalwart) was moved to pen a letter to the editor. Since The Times has not published the letter, I reproduce it here, with James Robertson’s permission:]

21 October 2015

Sir

Magnus Linklater asserts, once again, that those who believe the conviction of Abdelbaset al-Megrahi for the 1988 Lockerbie bombing to be unsound are ‘conspiracy theorists’, and that they should ‘accept that the evidence points firmly in the direction of Libya rather than the myriad of misty theories and unsupported allegations on which their case has rested’. It is Mr Linklater who is, once again, profoundly and wilfully mistaken.

He states that last week the Crown Office announced that it had ‘identified two further suspects, and was asking the government in Tripoli to allow it access to them in prison’. This identification appears to have come, not from any ‘long and dogged investigation’ by the Scottish police or Crown Office, but from information contained in the recent American television documentary made by Ken Dornstein, whose brother David was killed at Lockerbie. Mr Dornstein’s motivation in wanting to find out who murdered his brother cannot be questioned, but whether he has uncovered any significant new evidence remains to be seen.

There remain, too, the difficulties of interviewing these men given the current chaotic situation in Libya. The Crown Office has requested the Attorney General of Libya to allow it access to them, but they are held, not by the administration based in Tobruk and recognised by the UK, but by the National Salvation administration based in Tripoli. Those of us who seek justice for Abdelbaset al-Megrahi as well as for the families of the victims of Lockerbie would welcome the case being re-opened in a court of law: the prospects of this happening as a result of these latest developments are remote indeed.

Elsewhere, Mr Dornstein has been quoted as saying of one of the suspects, Mohammed Abouajela Masud, that, ‘figuring out simply that he existed would solve many of the unanswered questions to the bombing because he was attached to Megrahi according to the best information there was, including at the airport in Malta on the day that the bomb was said to have been infiltrated into the baggage system and ultimately on to Flight 103.’ If this is representative of the quality of the ‘new’ evidence, it is deeply disappointing. It simply reinforces an already discredited line of reasoning, albeit one which the court at Camp Zeist accepted,which insists – despite compelling evidence to the contrary – that the bomb began its journey in Malta and not at Heathrow, that the timer used to detonate the bomb was ‘similar in all respects’ to timers in Libyan hands, that there was no dubiety about the identification of Megrahi as purchaser, in a Malta shop, of clothes later retrieved from the bomb suitcase, and so on.

Despite what Mr Linklater avers, the arguments which oppose this version of events have ‘followed the evidence’ and are indeed based on ‘hard facts’. To dismiss the serious concerns about the way in which the case against Megrahi was prosecuted is to accept that the Scottish justice system operated impeccably throughout, and is beyond reproach. The ‘hard facts’ suggest the very opposite.

It is time, Mr Linklater writes, to ‘extinguish the last embers of controversy that have heated the Lockerbie case for so long.’ There is a straightforward way of doing that: allow all the evidence to be heard by an appeal court or by a properly constituted inquiry.

James Robertson

Dissatisfaction and disquiet

[The Waterstones Scottish book of the month is James Robertson’s The Professor of Truth. Here is what he writes about the novel on the Waterstones website:]

After my last novel, And the Land Lay Still – which fills nearly 700 pages, has a huge cast of characters and covers 60 years of social and political change – I was keen to write something more concise and closely focused. At the same time, I had become increasingly interested in, and disturbed by, the story of the destruction of Pan Am Flight 103 over the town of Lockerbie 25 years ago this year, and its long and complicated aftermath. Gradually I came to realise that these two strands of thinking were not in competition but were drawing together. The Professor of Truth is the outcome of that process.

Like many other people, I can remember exactly what I was doing on the evening of 21st December 1988 as news of that terrible event broke. I was working as a bookseller in what was, at the time, the only Edinburgh branch of Waterstones, on George Street. The shop was crowded with customers buying Christmas presents. A colleague who mistakenly thought I was from the Lockerbie area phoned in to tell me there’d been a plane crash there. When I got home later, that was the only story on the news. The scale of the devastation, the fact that it had happened in Scotland, and the announcement a few days later that it had been caused not by bad weather or mechanical failure but by a bomb, made a deep and lasting impression.

The ramifications of the Lockerbie bombing have spread far beyond Scotland, of course. There has been much dissatisfaction and disquiet over the conduct of the investigation into the bombing, the process and outcome of the trial of the two men accused of carrying it out, the conviction of one of those men, and his subsequent release from prison, on compassionate grounds, eight years later. A year ago that man, Abdelbaset Ali al-Megrahi, died of cancer even as his country Libya was emerging from a bloody revolution. Yet despite his death and the overthrow of the Gaddafi regime, blamed by the USA and UK for the bombing, serious questions about Lockerbie persist, and the affair continues to cast a long shadow over the Scottish justice system.

Julian Barnes has said that fiction is “telling the truth by telling lies”. One of the functions of a novel is to explore what it is to be human, and to do this more subtly than is possible through, for example, the hard facts or loaded opinions of journalism. I could have attempted a work of non-fiction about Lockerbie, but there is no shortage of such material on the subject, both in print and on-line. What I wanted to do instead was move away from the real event, and imagine the emotional and philosophical journey that might be taken by a man after losing his loved ones in a similar set of circumstances. In the novel, that journey also becomes a physical one: Alan Tealing, a university lecturer, receives a visit from an American former intelligence officer, and this prompts him to travel from snowbound Scotland to Australia, in one last attempt to unravel the truth about who killed his wife and daughter.

So The Professor of Truth is a novel which grew out of, rather than is about, the Lockerbie affair. I hope it is read, and is readable, as a novel, but if it can also help to expose some of the still hidden aspects of the real events that inspired it, that in my view would be no bad thing.

James Robertson, for Waterstones.com/blog

The Professor of Truth, by James Robertson, is available at your local Waterstones bookshop (http://bit.ly/Yu5LpV) or online at Waterstones.com (http://bit.ly/15x6PuV)