The writer-director of Oscar-nominated films such as ‘Passion Fish’ and ‘Lone Star’ returns with a novel this time.
is best known for movies he’s made, such as “Passion Fish” and “Lone Star,” both of which earned him Oscar nominations for his original screenplays., 72, didn’t start his career with filmmaking in mind. By the time of his movie debut with “Return of the Secaucus 7” in 1980, Sayles already had written a pair of acclaimed novels, including “Union Dues, a finalist for the 1978 National Book Award.
John Sayles’ new novel, “Jamie MacGillivray,” is an historical adventure that sprawls from the Jacobite Rebellion in Scotland in 1745 to the American colonies and the French and Indian War. When that uprising was crushed at the Battle of Culloden in 1746, MacGillivray escapes the noose for banishment to the American colonies, where his story moves from indentured servitude to life with a Native American tribe and fighting the English in the French and Indian War.
“I liked the idea so much I wrote a screenplay on spec,” Sayles says, using the technical term for writing a screenplay without pay or a contract lined up. “Then Robert Carlyle and Maggie , who I live with and was the producer on it, and I scouted the Highlands of Scotland with Robert, and then came back and scouted a bunch of locations that show up in the book here in the states and in Canada.
“I kind of grew up with the official story,” he says of the French and Indian War in particular, and the early settlement of North America in general. “Which was interesting, but not the complete story, you know, or not the complex story that when you really jump into the history you realize. There were court transcripts from the trial of Simon Fraser, the Scottish leader known as Lord Lovat, who backed the Jacobite rebellion and is a character in the book. Like Jamie, Lovat is taken to London and tried for treason, though his story ends not in the New World but on the executioner’s block.
Jamie and his fellow Scots speak in the dialect of the Highlands, though Jamie himself also speaks English and French. When Jenny arrives in Martinique, she’s faced with a French-speaking populace. Later, in the colonies, Jamie realizes that to survive his time with the Lenape, or Delaware, Indians he will need to learn their language.
In a way, the verisimilitude of the dialogue helps Sayles deliver the feeling of truth that fiction can achieve and traditional history sometimes cannot.
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