The Testament of Gideon Mack by James Robertson

The devil isn't such a bad chap, really

What if you were an atheist who happened to be a minister? In early middle age, widowed for 11 years, feeling the pinch of your compromises (if not the stab of your conscience), you encounter the reality of the mystic world in a violently unambiguous form. That in itself would be world-reversing; but the being you encounter is not the longed-for, long-feared God of the kirk, it's the devil. And he's not such a bad chap really.

This novel stands in the honourable tradition of the invented history, the feigned memoir. Gideon Mack, a church of Scotland minister, has caused scandal on several counts: he has disappeared, reappeared, denied God, claimed acquaintance with the devil, and disappeared again. And he has left a testament recording everything.

A "son of the Manse", who knows God exists, but has never believed in him, he becomes a minister; not from conviction, but from a perverse desire both to please and to spite his magnificent but forbidding father. He can't do faith, but he can do charity. Someone, somewhere, is about to rumble him. His wife Jenny is killed in a car accident, and he yearns for her best friend, his best friend's wife - as he always has. Then, out running, he sees a great standing stone where none stood before. Perhaps only he can see it. A strange tremor afflicts his left arm, and this same tremor sends him down into a gorge, where, for three days, he converses with the devil, who has rescued him from the water.

Though the book is weak on belief, it is fascinating on atheism. The whole clan is present in all its diversity: from the fierce agnosticism of Catherine Craigie, Mack's sour but sassy confidante, the restless scepticism of John, his best friend, the tolerant humanism of Jenny, the hard, hectoring faith of Peter MacMurray, which represents another kind of unbelief. Mack's father, the minister, could easily have remained a kirk cliché, but Robertson is in some ways on his side: he gives him some of the novel's most powerful insights. The passage describing his wife's death is simply written but heart-rending. The narrator remains sympathetic despite his avowed hypocrisy, his agonising, and his treachery to his best friend. When the devil assures Mack that he will see Hell when he next visits his declining mother, he is proved right in a chillingly persuasive passage.

But as the novel advances, the strong, lyrical voice of Mack increasingly gives way to tepid dialogue. Everyone seems to be speaking in an idiom at least 10 years too young for them. The long-awaited devil is brilliantly described, but his insights are coffee-table commonplaces.

This is a hard novel to dislike, but a still harder one to praise from the gut. Beneath all the tragedies, the intimations of mystery and magic, the intense and essentially undergraduate pontifications about faith, lies a fluffy message itself all too reminiscent of an earnest, erring, perhaps secretly agnostic vicar's homily.