The Testament of Gideon Mack [BARGAIN PRICE] (Hardcover)

~ (Author)

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

Robertson offers in his absorbing American debut (two novels have been published in the U.K.) the cleverly framed autobiography of a Scottish minister who confronts the devil. A brief foreword claims the book is an autobiography penned by Gideon Mack, a Church of Scotland minister who, after allegedly encountering the devil, becomes a pariah and madman before disappearing. Raised by a harsh minister father, Gideon abandons faith at an early age, but later discovers it's possible to "be a Christian without involving Christ very much" and secures the pulpit at a small coastal church where he proves to be a gifted preacher. After his wife dies in a traffic accident, Gideon consummates a long-held obsession with old friend Elsie, whose husband, John, is also a longtime friend. A conflicted Gideon, while walking with another minister, falls into a gorge and is presumed dead. But he appears downstream, only slightly injured, three days later. His survival is miraculous, but his account of what happened is scandalous: he was saved by the devil. Gideon's struggle to find meaning in his experience leads to his undoing. Gideon's sly unreliability is cloaked by Robertson's mastery of language and command of the elements of fiction; the combination is addictive and captivating. (Apr.)
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved. --This text refers to an alternate Hardcover edition.

From The Washington Post

Reviewed by Ron Charles

Does He or doesn't He? Judging by the religion books on the bestseller list, Americans are up in arms about the existence of God: not so much a Great Awakening as a Great Arguing. It's become an article of faith that the United States is the most religious nation in the developed world, but The God Delusion, by atheist Richard Dawkins, is racking up heavenly sales. At the same time, we're fascinated by a 2nd-century Gnostic fragment that claims Judas was the best disciple and a book about two archaeologists who have found The Jesus Family Tomb (so much for the Ascension). Sam Harris has written A Letter to a Christian Nation, but Stephen Prothero says our Religious Literacy has gone to hell. It's as though the whole country -- or at least that part of it still buying books -- is crying, "Lord, I believe; help thou mine unbelief."

Into this anxious cultural moment, The Testament of Gideon Mack has arrived like an answer to some demonic prayer. James Robertson's provocative novel claims to present the memoir of a hardworking Presbyterian minister who never believed in God. It's a deeply unsettling story that will prick the faith of the devout, shake the confidence of atheists and haunt those of us who hover uneasily in-between.

Part of the novel's disruption of our sense of what's real and what's not is an introduction by "the editor" -- one of Robertson's clever poses -- who disavows any claims about the story's authenticity. It may be "outlandish enough to attract a cult readership," he speculates, or it may be "a genuine document with its own relevance for our times." He wouldn't presume to judge one way or the other, but he does mention the strange events that recently brought this story to public notice: Gideon Mack, the minister of a small Scottish village, fell into a gorge while trying to rescue a friend's dog. Although presumed dead, he was found alive three days later in what doctors and journalists termed "a miracle." He seemed in good health, but soon after the accident he announced that he had never believed in God, had slept with one of his parishioners and had been rescued from the gorge by the Devil. During the ecclesiastical trial that followed, he vanished, but his body was found many months later in the mountains, and the police recovered the "testament" that constitutes the bulk of this novel.

Gideon begins with a line from St. Paul that quickly slides into his own intense voice: "When I was a child I spoke as a child, I understood as a child, I thought as a child: yet I was already, in so many ways, the man I would become. I think back on how cold I was, even then. It is hard to recall, now that I burn with this dry, feverish fire."

The son of a severe, Calvinist minister and a hollow, frightened mother, Gideon grew up in a dreary home divorced from time. While his schoolmates were "listening agog to Sergeant Pepper," he was reading "children's classics deemed suitable because they were at least half a century old and their authors dead." When his father catches him watching "Batman" (on the Sabbath!), he thunders, "You have betrayed me and you have betrayed God," and then promptly suffers a stroke right there in front of the TV.

His father survives, but that calamity pushes Gideon -- at the age of 12 -- to question and finally reject the stalking God who would set up such traps and punishments. "I didn't want that spooky figure hovering behind me and touching me whenever I tried to make a decision. I wanted to be left alone." But unable to declare his unbelief or leave the church, he develops "hypocrisy down to a fine art," and, in a tragic act of revenge, he follows his father into the ministry. "For nearly forty years," he writes, "I have let the world assume that I believed in God when I did not."

John Updike wrote about a Presbyterian minister who lost his faith in In the Beauty of the Lilies (1996), but Updike never quite captured the sticky quality of belief. For his Rev. Wilmot "the sensation was distinct -- a visceral surrender, a set of dark sparkling bubbles escaping upward. . . . His thoughts had slipped with quicksilver momentum into the recognition that . . . there is no such God." Robertson is far more attentive to the prolonged and violent tension between faith and doubt in the mind of a person who once really believed. Gideon fancies himself an effective minister despite his secretly rationalist mindset. He's busy with charity work, handy with an inclusive sermon. But he never can find any peace or love.

And then his world is overturned by a supernatural intercession. You must meet Robertson's droll Devil. He's "suave and fit-looking" but also a little sad. "I used to have a purpose," he tells Gideon with a sigh. "We both had a purpose, God and me. Now? . . . My heart's not in it. Basically, I don't do anything any more. I despair, if you want the honest truth. I mean, the world doesn't need me." This is an arresting encounter, a wry addition to the line of stories that stretches from Jesus's temptation in the wilderness to Nathaniel Hawthorne's "Young Goodman Brown." Like God, the Devil never leaves anyone where he finds him, and Gideon returns to his church aflame with a truth he never preached before. What he now knows -- or thinks he knows -- forces everyone to consider the fragile foundation of what they believe.

There's devilry for sure in a story this disquieting. You won't find Robertson blessing the devout or the atheists. But before Gideon departs this world, his testament will affirm your faith in the power of fiction.

Copyright 2007, The Washington Post. All Rights Reserved. --This text refers to an alternate Hardcover edition.

See all Editorial Reviews

Product Details

• Hardcover: 400 pages
• Publisher: Viking Adult (March 22, 2007)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 067003844X
• ASIN: B0011MRID8
• Product Dimensions: 9.1 x 6.2 x 1.4 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.3 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 4.2 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (8 customer reviews)
• Amazon.com Sales Rank: #910,576 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

17 of 17 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars A fantastic encounter in the netherworld, April 29, 2007

By	Roy E. Perry "amateur philosopher" (Nolensville, Tennessee) - See all my reviews (TOP 1000 REVIEWER)    (REAL NAME)

This review is from: The Testament of Gideon Mack (Hardcover)

Martin Buber asserted, "The atheist staring from his attic window is often nearer to God than the believer caught up in his own false image of God." And Friedrich Nietzsche observed, "A casual stroll through the lunatic asylum shows that faith does not prove anything."

In The Testament of Gideon Mack, Scottish writer James Robertson deals with these themes: faith and doubt, orthodoxy and heresy, the overlap of myth and history, and life's uncanny conjunctions.

Gideon Mack is the minister of Old Kirk, in the small Scottish coastal town of Monimaskit, near Dundee. A pastor beloved by his parishioners (most of them), he has raised thousands of dollars for charity by running in various marathons.

Judging from appearances, one would esteem Gideon a successful servant of the (Presbyterian) Church of Scotland, toiling faithfully in the Lord's vineyard.

Trouble is, Gideon is an atheist (or agnostic) whose apparent faith in God is a theatrical performance. He is also carrying on a torrid affair with the wife of his best friend.

Nevertheless, all goes well for Gideon until one day, while he is running in the Keldo Woods, he stops abruptly when he sees an ancient standing stone, a stone that had not been there before. From that moment, his life begins to go downhill.

While walking again in the Keldo Woods, this time with a female minister friend, Gideon attempts to rescue his friend's dog that, in chasing a rabbit over the cliff, is perched precariously on a narrow outcropping in the rock.

Gideon saves the dog, but cannot save himself. He plummets into the treacherous depths of the Black Jaws, a gulf or ravine of great depth, through which cascades the furious torrent of the Keldo River.

Missing for three days, and presumed dead, Gideon miraculously survives the ordeal, fished out of the river by a fellow villager. Gideon has quite a story to tell, one that causes many people in Monimaskit to be shocked by his heresies and blasphemies.

Gideon writes a "testament," a manuscript of approximately a hundred thousand words, in which he describes his encounter with the devil, spending three days and nights walking and talking with God's great adversary.

The devil appears to him as a forlorn, world-weary man who is tired of playing the game, and who reveals to him that there is no grand scheme of things, no eternal plan. Human beings, he asserts, are deserted by the deity, left to their own floundering devices.

The devil also tells him that people believe what they want to believe. The proliferation of world religions, with their conflicting claims, indicates that one man's faith is another man's fiction, that one man's persuasive myth is another man's preposterous legend.

Gideon learns the truth spoken by John Milton: "The mind is its own place, and in itself, can make heaven of Hell, and a hell of Heaven."

Seeing the folly of his hypocrisy, Gideon resolves to speak the whole truth to his congregation--his lack of faith in God and his erotic liaison with Elsie Moffat--which he proceeds to do. Definitely not a brilliant career move.

Robertson's novel alludes to the movie E.T., to Pascal's wager argument and its fatal logical flaw, to Bunyan's Pilgrim's Progress, to Captain Ahab's obsession with the white whale, and to Goethe's Faust.

Is Gideon Mack's account of his visit to the netherworld the diary of a madman or the memoirs of a supreme truth teller? Although reading Gideon's incredible document requires a sustained suspension of disbelief, one becomes convinced that Gideon, even if he is pitifully delusional, firmly believes in the truth of his revelations.

Although of dubious worth philosophically and theologically, The Testament of Gideon Mack, the devil's advocate, is a fascinating and captivating psychological character study--of the conflict of head vs. heart, thinking vs. feeling, faith vs. unbelief.

Reading this novel is an unsettling experience. Such is the artistry of James Robertson, one occasionally forgets that this is indeed a work of fiction, and is caught up in the passion of a real-life drama. Like Gideon Mack himself, Robertson has engineered a powerful theatrical performance that leaves his audience stunned and nonplussed.

James Robertson is the author of two previously critically acclaimed novels published in the U.K., The Fanatic (2000) and Joseph Knight (2003). The latter was awarded the two major Scottish literary awards in 2003/4--the Soltire Book of the Year and the Scottish Arts Council Book of the Year. He has also published stories, poetry, anthologies, essays, and a Scottish Dictionary of Quotations. He served as the Scottish Parliament's first writer in residence in 2004 and was selected for a prestigious Creative Scotland Award in 2006. He lives in Angus, Scotland.

8 of 8 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Richly imagined tale of spiritual awakening, November 24, 2007

By	Reader from Singapore - See all my reviews

This review is from: The Testament of Gideon Mack (Hardcover)

James Robertson's "The Testament of Gideon Mack" is quite the most wonderfully engaging and satisfying work of fiction I have read in a long, long while. Considering the duds that made the Booker shortlist last year, I'm baffled as to why it made the longlist but went no further.

Gideon Mack, son of a Calvinist minister and himself a Presbyterian minister in the small Scottish village of Old Kirk, is a secret unbeliever. He ministers faithfully to his parishioners and preaches every Sunday to his flock without believing a word of what he's saying. In short, he is a spiritual imposter and a charlatan. Being a minister is just his day job. Yet, why is it that we can't help but come away with the feeling that he isn't remotely the hypocrite the above suggests he should be ? Could it be that we ask ourselves, how could anyone growing up in a family where the father (himself a man of the cloth) is as unnaturally severe and closed-minded and the mother as downtrodden and deflated as Gideon's be expected to believe in the institution of marriage and family and have faith in the existence of a loving God ? Sadly perhaps, the instruments of God are often his worst advocates.

Ironically, it is Gideon and not his religious colleagues or openly agnostic friends who are chosen to experience the spiritual awakening vis-à-vis an amazing encounter with the Devil during those missing hours between the time he fell off a cliff into the gushing waters whilst trying to rescue a friend's dog and the time he's delivered back into the arms of the living. The sudden appearance of a standing stone in Keldo Woods, a phenomenon though not exclusively visible to him but in fact observed only by him - is a spooky precursor of his strange encounter with the horned one. His conversation with the Devil reveals a message of abandonment by God, which in turn propels him to come clean with his community. His confession is unwelcome as it upsets the studied and ordered lives of those around him. His best friend's wife, Elsie, whom he lusts after and had a tryst with proves faithless even as a friend. His fellow minister, Lorna, who has long nursed a secret crush on him proves equally adept at shutting him out when the message of his strange encounter flies in the face of her religious belief. Are these people - religious or agnostic - in any sense better or morally superior to Gideon ? At least, Gideon was open and had the honesty and humility to confess his ignorance as a human being who may not know the truth but is vulnerable to revelations from the world beyond.

"The Testament of Gideon Mack" doesn't tell one to believe or not to believe. It does however nail religious belief to the realm of the unknown. People believe what they believe or want to believe. Regardless of the truth, with openness and humility, one is more likely to behave like a decent human being.

Robertson has written an incredibly rich and absorbing novel that is full of literary flourishes, wit and imagination. It makes for a thoroughly satisfying read. I can't recommend it highly enough.

3 of 3 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Mystifying., September 19, 2007

By	Daniel A. Scott "Just honest!" (Philippi, WV) - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)

This review is from: The Testament of Gideon Mack (Hardcover)

It was mystifying and powerful all in one and I'm not even sure why. It draws you in and builds to the breakng point and yet it doesn't let you down when it's over. The author left the end open for interpretation and didn't spoon feed it to us. The whole time I was reading it a somber feeling was in the air. It felt like one of those fall days when it seems to have a constant drizzle and the only thing to do is curl up in a corner and relax, that's the feeling I got with that book. Whether that helps somebody want to read it, I couldn't say.