James Robertson on Joseph Knight

James Robertson writes about winning the 2004 award with his novel, Joseph Knight:

I first came across a brief mention of the story of Joseph Knight in a book about Dundee in, I think, 2000. At the time I was just beginning to sketch out something quite different, a novel about an atheist schoolteacher who is devastated when confronted by apparently powerful evidence of the existence of God. That novel would eventually become The Testament of Gideon Mack, the teacher having metamorphosed into an unbelieving Presbyterian minister who meets the Devil in a cave. But I put aside all that frothy metaphysical stuff as soon as I stumbled on the true experiences of Joseph Knight – a slave brought to Scotland from Jamaica who fought for his freedom at the Court of Session in late 18th century Edinburgh. This was a story so rich in incident, characters and historical and cultural significance that I felt I had no option but to research it and retell it.

There were gaps in the historical record – not least being a complete absence of information about what happened to Knight after he faced down his master John Wedderburn in court – but this simply meant that fiction came into its own as a means of reconstructing the past. In fact, the cast of real-life characters – Knight and Wedderburn themselves, other planters, slaves and their families, Samuel Johnson, James Boswell, and all the eccentric, hard-drinking judges, philosophers, poets and lawyers who made Enlightenment Edinburgh such a vibrant place – was so extraordinary that it was tempting (though not very) to tone them down a bit to make them more credible. As I gathered information, I became fascinated by the profound humanity of some of the people in the story, which was matched only by the hypocrisy of men in Edinburgh coffee houses debating what constituted a civil society while enjoying the products of slave labour thousands of miles away.

Somebody directed me to an aphorism of the Nigerian writer Ben Okri: ‘Nations and peoples are largely the stories they feed themselves. If they tell themselves stories that are lies, they will suffer the future consequences of those lies. If they tell themselves stories that face their own truths, they will free themselves for future flowerings.’ This gave me the key to what I felt the book was about: Joseph Knight, or his story, came to symbolise a Scotland full of possibilities, past, present and future. I’d always been interested in how different times can speak to one another, how our understanding of ‘then’ can influence our understanding of ‘now’ and vice versa, and here was that same thing happening again. The last line of Edwin Morgan’s poem ‘King Billy’ also rang in my mind: ‘Deplore what is to be deplored, and then find out the rest.’

Although history informs just about everything I write, Joseph Knight is the only completely historical novel I’ve written to date. Despite good reviews and the reception of both the Scottish Arts Council and Saltire Society Book of the Year awards, and although many readers have told me how much they enjoyed it, of my four novels it has sold the least well. I don’t know why this is, but it makes me all the more grateful that it got the recognition it did back in 2003–04. You can never tell what books will survive their own times – many bestsellers are gone and forgotten a decade after first publication – but I like to think that someone, some day far in the future, may pick up Joseph Knight and find that it opens a door for them into the strange but perhaps not irrelevant world of Enlightenment Edinburgh and Scotland’s deep engagement with slavery and the plantations.

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James Roberston’s latest book And the Land Lay Still is published by Hamish Hamilton.