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The Boat Is Sinking! Bail!

Oct 29, 2020
4 min

The Boat Is Sinking! Bail!

The ending of Now We Shall Be Entirely Free is rather open and ambiguous—to me, at least. It’s quite possible Andrew Miller might read my thoughts here and say, “Huh? No, you didn’t understand my book at all.” (Reminds me of the film, Annie Hall, where Marshall McLuhan chastises a fellow who’s spouting off about his writing). I’m going to risk it. But it does bring up an important point. Two people can read the same story and reach two different understandings. An author can

The End of Omniscience

Oct 22, 2020
4 min

The End of Omniscience

The narrational style of Now We Shall Be Entirely Free shifts from beginning to end. We’ve talked about how, in the beginning, it is classic omniscient, the narrator inhabiting many of the characters’ consciousness to show the story. As things develop, though, there is an increasing focus on just two, Lacroix, the protagonist, and Calley, the antagonist. A central character, Emily, who becomes Lacroix’s partner, is always shown in traditional third person narration; the reade

Oct 8, 2020
4 min

Sin-Eater

The significance of names in Now We Shall Be Entirely Free should probably be noted. John Lacroix certainly makes one think of the French word for “Cross,” a reference to Jesus Christ and the crucifixion. A reference perhaps to a characters who is to take on the sins of others, a martyr? A sin-eater, someone who atones for the sins of others. A sin-eater is a person who consumes a ritual meal in order to spiritually take on the sins of a deceased person. The food was believed

Oct 1, 2020
4 min

Some 'Splaining To Do

Now We Shall Be Entirely Free is a novel written around the year 2018, but the story takes place in the British Isles in 1810 after the battle of Corunna and the British retreat from Portugal. How does the book communicate this information to the reader? More broadly, how does it communicate the plot? This gets us into the issue of exposition. A definition: Narrative exposition is the insertion of background information within a story or narrative. This information can be ab

Sep 24, 2020
4 min

Now We Shall Be Entirely Free

This week, a new book, Now We Shall Be Entirely Free written by Andrew Miller, published in 2019. I first read it earlier this year, can’t remember how I heard about it, but the book had excellent reviews. Mr. Miller is the author of seven other novels. The time the story is set in, Napoleonic England, had an interest for me, as I’d been working on my own novel from this period. Now is a very different beastie than the other books I’ve been writing about, particularly in term